Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Google Research

    Interesting to see someone talking about all the research Google is spending money on, which aren’t directly related to their core business. The piece is a bit of a complaint, and it’s a valid one for shareholders.

    Personally I like what Google is doing. They’re experimenting, they’re trying to see if there are things that might work. Things that might impact their business. Or perhaps, give them a new business to get into.

    I hate that Google is getting so concerned about money in many ways. To me, that’s a sign they are losing their way a bit, focusing more on the money of their business, than the money. I like seeing them doing things other than just making money. To me, once a company gets too caught up in their stock price, and what it is doing, they start to go downhill.

    However they can go too far, and waste too much money. It’s good that people are keeping an eye on them. Reign in things that are wasting too much money, or going on without producing anything, but let them do some research.

  • Change your Windows path

    When you run something from the start menu or in a Windows command prompt, you type the program name to run the executable file. There are three ways in which you can execute something:

    1. the executable is in your current directory/folder
    2. you type the entire path to the executable.
    3. the PATH environment variable contains a value that points to the folder containing the executable.

    The first and second items are fairly self explanatory. In a command prompt, if I change to the \Windows folder in Windows 7, I see these executables:

    path1

    If I type notepad (the .exe isn’t required), Windows searches the folder, finds notepad.exe, and runs it.

    If I am in c:\Users\Steve, however, I can run notepad in one of two ways. I can do this:

    path2

    The other way is that I just type notepad, and it runs. How does this happen? It’s a holdover from DOS (and Unix) for an environment variable called PATH. My current path is returned by typing PATH in a command prompt.

    path3

     

    There are a lot of folders listed here, all separated by a semi colon.  Most of these are for various programs, and lots of installers alter the path to add their own folder. For example, the Live suite of products added this path

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Shared

    I would have thought most technical people knew how to change the path, but I found a developer recently that did not. I suspect most people don’t need to deal with this in most cases, so they aren’t aware.

    The way you should change this manually in Windows is this. Go to the properties of your system by right clicking the “Computer” item in the Start Menu and select Properties. You’ll get this screen (in Windows 7)

    path4 

    Select the “Advanced System Settings” in the left side. This is an admin function, so you need the UAC permission. This will open a new dialog

    path5

    The Environment variables are accessed through a button on the Advanced tab. Once you press that, it will give you the variables dialog.

    path6

    If you scroll down in the System Variables, you’ll see PATH as an item. Select “Edit” and you can change the path.

    path7

    The path is selected when this opens.

    DO NOT START TYPING.

    Instead hit the right arrow to de-select all the txt and move to the end (as shown in the image above). Add a semi-colon and your path, and OK back out of all dialogs. You’ll have a new path that you can use in your system.

  • Looking to Windows 9

    I haven’t played with Windows 8 yet, and only a little with Windows Phone 7, but I am a little concerned. This set of videos that show an older man, a CPA, a lifelong Windows user messing with Windows 8 and OSX are a bit telling to me.

    The whole start menu/tile thing is a problem to me. It’s no that big a deal in that once you learn it, you understand how it works, but it does seem to be an issue of design. The more I look at the tile/menu design, the more I’m bothered. It’s not a question of ergonomic design. The whole iOS design is something that just works. It was new, different, and it changed the way so many people view computers. For the first time, the majority of stuff you wanted to do just made sense. Not necessarily for us techies/power users, but for most of the world.

    I read through a dozen or so of the design considerations from Microsoft, and I appreciate it’s an impossible task. Or at least a Herculean task. However what it seems like it happening is that they’re still bound by viewing the world the old way. As much as they worry about moving the tile/start menu around to be more intuitive, they’re still stuck with stuff in the corners. If they want to be revolutionary, then think about the fact that our mice are often in the screen, somewhere near the application (a cell in Excel, a portion of a Word doc, or a scrollbar). Make the menu work from that point in time, or without the idea that I’m starting from the lower left.

    I watched this video from cNet with a hands on, and it definitely feels a little cherry-picking on features and ergonomics was shown, but I am looking forward to messing with it at some point. There are things I like about the direction they’re going, though I’m not sure they are going to work in the 1.0 implementation. However I thought I’d look forward to Windows 9 and talk about what I’d like to see.

    For the record. I use a Windows 7 desktop, with 3 monitors, but I travel with a Macbook Air that I love. It’s much better than the last 4 laptops I’ve had, smaller, and OSX Lion is a dream for me. I have an iPhone, which I use constantly. I also have an iPad that I use regularly, but not as much as my kids. I’ve been a Windows user primarily for two decades at work, and I don’t want to see Windows disappear. However I do think there are things Microsoft could do better.

    One Device

    More and more convergence seems to be on the mind of people. When PDAs first came out, I thought we might get there, but a decade of crappy devices that worked in a half-assed way, from the Palm to PocketPCs to Windows 6 smarthphones had me rethinking that. However with my Android G-1 and then my iPhone, I think to a large extent, I can converge. Not to one device, but two.

    I saw this device recently, the ASUS PadPhone, and thought it was pretty cool. It’s a phone, that slides into a tablet, which can attach a keyboard. The idea of getting my phone screen larger at times, would be very handy. Adding a keyboard is a natural step, since the virtual keyboards work OK, but aren’t always great.

    ht_asus_padfone_jp_120227_wblog

    The iPad changed the world and made us think of tablets. I think my iPad is very handy, but it’s not convenient. It doesn’t allow me to do technical work for presentations, which is an issue. It just lacks horsepower. I know for more people that’s potentially not an issue (my Mom loves hers), but it is for some of us. The iPad isn’t what I want.

    For most of us, however, the idea of a phone/tablet makes some sense. We want to use the form factors differently, and much of what I’ve seen in Windows 8 makes sense there, but I’m not sure about the desktop.

    Hot Hardware

    To me, the biggest thing that Windows 9 should have is hot hardware. Not cool, not flashy, but the core hardware ought to change without the OS freaking out.

    Ideally what I’d like is a core OS running on my phone, that I can then plug into another device (docking station, tablet, whatever) and have that docking station add CPUs, Memory, displays, etc. without the OS missing a beat. It might take a minute to sync up, but if I have a dual socket quad core CPUs on my desk, I’d like my OS session to take advantage of them. I want things to speed up. If I have 128GB of RAM on my desk, pick that up and start using it for Powerpivot, editing movies, or anything else.

    Undocking is definitely the harder part. When I lose RAM, what happens? Well, I’d expect that applications using that memory would have to suspect themselves, perhaps even in the other hardware. Or maybe they’d suspend, rebuild their state, and have to reload things from disk (on the phone). Threads on CPUs would be tricky, but there are a few scenarios on how to recover applications, including letting them die, but it could work.

    Potentially we’d start most CPU work as transactional as we do in databases, and only commit the state at known points, so that a drop in hardware would result in a “rollback”. I suppose we could also do something like spawn off threads that are either always on the phone/small device or always on the remote hardware, but there are some smart people in the world that I suspect could come up with a solution.

    I’d expect things might freeze state when I dock/undock, but I’d want them to keep working at some point, even if they went into some background/sleeping state.

    Virtualization

    I’d like to see more virtualization, but at a core application level. Let me essentially sandbox an application into a VM, which thinks it’s on it’s own OS installation, but limit it to very basic interactions, like the clipboard. Can you imagine if Windows did this, and opened up a few VMs from Linux, or even allowed people to get a $29 OSX install running for a few pieces of software? I don’t know the legalities, but it would be a game changer in many ways.

    Think Different

    The best thing Microsoft could do is really think different. Don’t evolve Windows, but really grow it into something that is handy, ergonomic, efficient, and effective. Don’t worry about matching up with older software. iOS showed many people will port their stuff over if you make it popular, so give up on making things backward compatible.

    Break things if you must, but just make it better.

  • Ownership Chains in SQL Server

    Someone asked the question recently about allowing a user to run a process,but not execute the individual pieces of the process. I replied that ownership chains allow this, and then explained things. Here’s a short example of that.

    Let’s suppose I have a process that removes data from a table and then reloads it. Perhaps it’s a report, perhaps it’s a static look at inventory, it doesn’t matter. Can I allow a normal user to execute the entire process, but not the clear or load pieces?

    I can, and here’s how.

    Suppose I have a clear procedure:

    CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.spClear
AS
BEGIN
   select 'Clear'
END
go

    For the sake of this example, I don’t have any work here, but the "SELECT ‘Clear"’” could be replaced by a TRUNCATE TABLE or other statement.

    By default in SQL Server, I don’t have rights to execute procedures that I haven’t created. In this case, assume a db_owner created this procedure, so a normal user, Joe, would not be able to execute it. In fact, if I log in as Joe and run this, I get:

    SETUSER 'Joe' 
go
-- Fails
EXEC spClear
go

    Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure spClear, Line 1

    The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘spClear’, database ‘db1’, schema ‘dbo’.

     

    That’s expected, and it’s good.

    Let’s also create a load procedure, as the db_owner.

    CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.spLoad
as
BEGIN
   select 'Load'
END
go

    Now to manage the process, let’s create a wrapper stored procedure that calls these. For the sake of tracking what’s happening, I have a few statements in there.

    CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.spRefresh
AS
BEGIN
   select 'Refresh start'
   EXEC spClear
   EXEC spLoad
   SELECT 'Refresh End'
END
go

    If I were to call this process, this is what I’d expect from the call stack:

    • a call spRefresh
    • a result set returning “Refresh Start’”
    • a call to spClear
    • a result set returning “Clear”
    • return to spRefresh
    • a call to spLoad
    • a result set returning “Load”
    • a return to spRefresh
    • a result set returning “Refresh End”
    • end of spRefresh

    Obviously I could have actual delete or truncates in the clear procedure and then some insert in the load procedure. If I attempt to run this as Joe, I get:

    Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure spRefresh, Line 1

    The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘spRefresh’, database ‘db1’, schema ‘dbo’.

    Expected, because I haven’t granted Joe rights. Let’s do that and execute the procedure:

    GRANT EXECUTE ON dbo.spRefresh TO Joe
go
SETUSER 'Joe' 
GO
EXEC spRefresh

    I get what I expected for results:

    ownership_a

    I have rights to execute spRefresh. Since the same owner exists for all three objects, dbo in this case, I have a chain that permissions are not checked for spLoad and spClear. I can execute them in the context of spRefresh.

    What about separately?

    EXEC spLoad

    gets me:

    Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure spLoad, Line 1

    The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘spLoad’, database ‘db1’, schema ‘dbo’.

    and 

    EXEC spClear

    gets me

    Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure spClear, Line 1

    The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘spClear’, database ‘db1’, schema ‘dbo’.

    A nice way to allow someone to execute a group of processes without allowing them to execute any individual one.