Top 10 Things I Learned Last Week: Week of 4/18/2010
- The MidnightDBA (web|twitter) version of phone sex involves dental floss.
- If you mention that you’ve never used Powershell Aaron Nelson (web|twitter) will offer to purchase, mix, and deliver to your door any and all Powershell Kool-Aid necessary to get you to drink.
- Allen White (web|twitter) is now on Twitter. (Also note this occurred just in time for the Twitter #boobquake protest (potentially NSFW). Coincidence? There is no such thing as coincidence. Also, when you work from home there is no such this as NSFW. Unless, of course you provide in-home daycare then you’re pretty much screwed.
- There are software development firms out there that though forcing you into 8-year old configurations also do the right thing and mandate you not run in Mixed Mode. This is the first SQL Server instance I’ve built in 10+ years that has allowed me to do so. Too bad it’s 2010 and this is a SQL Server 2005 instance running on Windows Server 2003 32-bit. You still suck <REDACTED>.
- It’s really hard to get blood stains out of a wedding dress. (Just checking to see if you’re paying attention.)
- After not doing any cardio beyond dashing for a cup of coffee for the past eight weeks it’s just plain stupid to do an hour of spinning, an hour of circuit training, and an hour of advanced kettlebell all starting at 8 am on a Saturday Morning. This is how Robin Givens probably felt after her honeymoon or how Mike Tyson felt after she was done with him in divorce court. I now remember that Saturday mornings were meant for recovery from Friday nights.
- Central Management Servers can save you your minion days hours worth of important menial work. I needed to make a change to a SQL Server Agent job that I have on all of my SQL Servers. Something simple – the change took only a few seconds and one line of code. If not for Central Management Servers I my minion, Dr. sp_who, would have spent hours connecting to each SQL Server instance to run the script that dropped and recreated the job. Thanks to CMS it took about a minute. I found this out because I tasked Dr. sp_who with rolling out this change at 10:00 am and noticed he was chasing a pigeon around the front yard with a spork at 10:10. Later when I confronted him he told me it took him 6 hours. Upon further *vigorous* questioning he referenced CMS and stated that he was able to get it done with a single mouse click. I scolded him for the lying then sacked him for attempting to be craftier than I. Dammit. Sometimes SQLAgentMan needs to use some tough love.
- I’m now taking minion applications. Who wants to be Dr. sp_who2? Send resumes to SQLAgentMan@yahoo.com. I am not above taking bribes.
- I am not as familiar with Access as I once was. I was asked by my friends at MSSQLTips.com to write a series of tips on transitioning from Access to SQL and it’s not as easy as you would think. Where did they put all the knobs and switches?
- My hate for SQL Server Replication continues to fester and grow. Particularly when the end users, application support staff, and vendor can’t tell you why they require replication – but that you can’t turn it off.