Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

A Solid Laser Printer

I bought a Brother 2060 about 5 years ago to serve as our primary printer at the ranch. It was a basic, compact, black and white laser that did a good job for us. It seems as though we’ve had it forever, and I’ve only replaced the toner once. We don’t print a ton, but it’s been a very solid printer.

In that time, we’ve had an HP inkjet, and an Epson Workforce 610 Inkjet all in one that currently works fine, but is very flaky on the network. We’ve been reduced during the last week to saving images to a flash drive and plugging that into the Epson.

That’s because the old Brother seemed to die. The feed for paper (auto or manual) just won’t pull paper in, and so the machine doesn’t print.

I asked for a few recommendations from Twitter. I was thinking to bite the bullet and get a color laser, which might replace both printers, and keep the Epson as a spare. We don’t print a lot, but the kids sometimes need color for school stuff, and we definitely need something to print out the occasional document. Usually so we can tackle the process using the antiquated fax method.

We looked at a few recommendations and were considering the a Brother color laser, but it felt wrong to spend $300 for something that we rarely need. I’d rather fuss with the inkjet when we need it, or even buy new ink.

So we settled on the Brother 2270, pictured above. It’s a low end printer, for $120, and hopefully it will last as long as our previous one.

February 29, 2012
AdventureWorks in SQL Server 2012 RC0

The sample databases for SQL Server 2012 haven’t been completely finalized, but I was able to find the latest version here for AdventureWorks. This download gives you an mdf, and that’s it. You can’t directly attach that in SSMS, but you can use T-SQL to do it.

CREATE DATABASE ADVENTUREWORKS

ON (FILENAME = ‘c:\SQLdata\ADventureWorks2008R2_data.mdf’)

FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG

You get a note that the log file is invalid from the MDF, but a new log is created and you have your sample databases attached.

February 29, 2012
Azure is Down

I saw a note about an outage on Windows Azure, apparently one that’s been going on for seven hours. Once again it seems that February 29 has struck again with a computer issue, and it makes me worry that if we mess with daylight savings time, we might have similar issues in the future.

I went to the main Azure page, and this is what I saw

I wrote about cloud computing today, and higher salaries. While this isn’t good news for the cloud, perhaps it means that salaries will be even higher.

February 29, 2012
Backing up a Certificate
If you create your own certificate in SQL Server, you need to make sure that you back it up immediately. Once you start to encrypt anything with a certificate, you increase the risk that you’ll lose your data if an catastrophic event occurs. In this case, if you lose the certificate, you can’t access the data.

I talked about creating a certificate in another post, and there is corresponding DDL for backing up a certificate. BACKUP CERTIFICATE is the command you want to use, and it works like most of the other backup commands.

Let’s assume I have the certificate named MySalaryCert from the previous post. To create the backup of this certificate, I’d issue:
```
BACKUP CERTIFICATE MySalaryCert
 TO FILE = N'c:\SQLBackup\MySalaryCert.cer'
 WITH PRIVATE KEY
  ( FILE = N'c:\SQLBackup\MySalaryCert.pvk'
  , ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = N'AReallyStr0ngK#y4You'
  , DECRYPTION BY PASSWORD = N'R3allyToughP@ssword4You'
  )
;
```
This will generate two files for me in c:\sqlbackup as shown below.

The certificate was created with a password, so the backup must include the DECRYPTION BY option with that password. The password you use for the backup can be different, as shown, but you need to be sure that you manage this password properly. You will need it to restore the certificate, which I’ll show you next time.
February 27, 2012