Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQLServerCentral

  • SQL Scripts Manager

    We have Down Tools Week multiple times per year at Red Gate. This allows various employees to spend a week on a project, working to build something new and interesting that we rarely have time to spend our limited resources on. Past projects have resulted in SQL Search, a mobile view of Simple Talk, and a number of internal tools that have proven very beneficial.

    Last year one of our developers embarked on a project for SQLServerCentral to provide a plug-in for Management Studio to allow access to the scripts on our site. This wasn’t quite complete enough to release, but when Down Tools week occurred recently, a few developers collaborated to complete this project.

    We’re releasing this Management Studio plug-in today, SQL Scripts Manager, along with our framework to build your own plugins.  You can download the tool from this link, and a link will also be placed at the top of our Scripts section at SQLServerCentral. Once you have this plugin installed, you can search for and download scripts inside SSMS, and access your briefcase without ever switching applications.

    I think this is really amazing, and I’m hoping that many of you find it useful. It’s a great way to easily access your collection of scripts from anywhere, getting the latest versions of the code from SQLServerCentral that you find really useful.

    If you have comments, suggestions, bugs, etc., please feel free to post them in this thread.

    We’ve worked hard at Red Gate to not only build useful tools that help you build software, but also teach you how to better create your own applications. We’ll have more information and more details on the framework coming soon as well, and we look forward to seeing what types of enhancements you’ll create for SSMS. If you create something really useful, send us a note and we’ll feature your tool on the site.

  • 2013 Tribal Awards

    We’re the #sqlfamily on Twitter, and often in person where we often get together for a #sqlrun in the morning and a bit of #sqlkaraoke at night. In some sense, we are a tribe within the larger technology community, focused on our common work with SQL Server. I thought the title for  was fantastic, bringing together new authors to share their knowledge, and raise money for a charity.

    At SQLServerCentral and Simple Talk, with the sponsorship of Red Gate Software, we decided to create some end of year awards in various categories, based on the community, not companies or products. We kick off our nominations today in a number of categories, including Advice that saved my bacon in 2013, Best Speaker, Best Outfit, and more. You can read more about the categories in today’s announcement.

    The idea is that the community can recognize others in the community with a nomination, and some supporting material that encourages others to nominate the same individual, and vote for the winner. The top five with the most nominations will get voted on over the holidays with awards presented in January.

    I hope you have fun with this, and think back to those people and events that stand out in your mind in 2013.  Nominate them, give a few reasons, and celebrate the help that each of us gives each other as a part of the SQL Server tribe.

    PS: we had a great #sqlski last year for SQL Saturday in Albuquerque and we’re doing it again this year. Feel free to join us at Taos on Friday, January 24th, right before SQL Saturday #271 in Albuquerque on Jan 25, 2014.

    Steve Jones

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  • Filestream needs MAX

    I wrote today’s Question of the Day for SQLServerCentral on Filestream. I asked which data type was needed for Filestream data, and gave a few choices. Someone pointed out that I wasn’t complete in my choices, and that was by design.

    Filestream is an attribute placed on a column, not a datatype. Why it couldn’t be a datatype, I’m not sure, but that would have saved some confusion. In any case, there’s only one data type that can take the Filestream attribute, and that’s varbinary(max).  Not varchar(max), not varchar, and not variant. There isn’t, of course, a FILESTREAM type.

    However I didn’t want to include MAX since I thought it might sway people towards varbinary, and I was really hoping to teach people, not have them guess. I supposed I could have included MAX with all types, but to me, the (MAX) is also an attribute for the type.

    I think it’s a good question, but if you disagree, let me know. Writing better questions is something I want to do to help the community learn.

  • The Colocated Dangers

    Titanic Poster
    It’s not “if”, but “when” you will have a disaster.

    We went down.

    It was quite a surprise for me, and something that hasn’t happened in a long time. It wasn’t for long, but a month ago, there was a period of time when SQLServerCentral was down. It’s also one of the very few times it’s happened since I was in charge of the servers. The exact reason was something to do with out hardware, and it was fixed relatively quickly by our hosting provider.

    Early on in the site’s history we had a few hiccups. I was the one that drove out to a co-location facility to replace hardware or fix something that was broken. There were a few times where all that was required was a reboot, but we didn’t have the “remote hands” service available at a few of our hosting facilities. Fortunately for me I had an understanding boss that would allow me to flex and extend my lunch time during these emergencies.

    Since Red Gate purchased SQLServerCentral, we’ve had excellent uptime. A few outages for upgrades of the site, a minor DNS issue, and a few hiccups from maintenance by our hosting facility, but all very short. This hour-or-so long outage was the first unplanned outage in years. However it reminded me of a somethings: it’s not if a disaster will occur, but when it will occur?

    Putting all your data (and the servers it lives on) in one place is the fact of life that most of us have to live with, but we ought to have some idea of a DR plan if our data center goes down, or our hosting company has an issue. It might not be a thoroughly documented plan, but it ought to be a thoroughly thought out one.

    At least if expect your enterprise to continue to function during the disaster and your employment to continue after.

    Steve Jones

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