Guess there's no cricket this weekend

Doesn't look very promising :(

Chile rescue shaft nears trapped miners | News.com.au

Finally coming close to re-uniting these guys with their families

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/c1kk

Loving the canary build http://amplify.com/u/asog

Early Access Release Channels - The Chromium Projects

Get your latest Chrome fix here ...

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/arqe

Very cool look at an arcade games museum in Moscow.

http://adangerousbusiness.com/2010/01/05/the-museum-of-soviet-video-games/

Gotta Love Telstra

Yesterday

My Plan
Your current plan is BigPond Elite Liberty* (25GB) - Cable $89.95 monthly

 

Today

My Plan
Your current plan is BigPond Elite Liberty* (100GB) - Cable $79.95 monthly

 

 

Hmmm ... an extra 75GB for $10 less ... no I don't want that plan ... yeh roight!

Cats! I'm a kitty kat ...

An old one I found during a cleanup ...

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/kittycat.php

No cyberattack, but eerily similar

Read this write up about the big Wall Street drop on May 6 with interest.

For anyone that reads Tom Clancy, does it sound a bit too close to the financial crisis fomented by the Japanese in Debt of Honor?

T-SQL Tuesday #006: fixing the text blob

Thought I'd join the T-SQL Tuesday party. Originally started by  Adam Machanic (Twitter: @AdamMachanic), this one is hosted by Michael Coles.

Many moons ago whilst working for MyDBA we came across a data corruption problem at a client site. Their vendor supplied application running on SQL Server 2000 stored a bunch of notes in a text column with lovely HTML formatting. The same data was also stored in a separate column in the same row sans HTML markup for use in full-text searches.

For reasons lost to antiquity, they started getting a lot of data corruption errors. Any query that tried to retrieve data from the table with a corrupt record failed with a batch terminating severity 20 error, or it may have been severity 21, and a nasty long complicated message was presented to the end users.

Running DBCC CHECKTABLE detected the errors and advised that the minimum repair level was REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS. Running this on a test instance of the database resulted in the offending rows being removed from the table and DBCC CHECKTABLE ran clean. Needless to say, our client wasn't impressed with the legal situation that placed them in, data loss was not acceptable.

Luckily, we were able to determine that it was the text data field used by the full-text indexing that was corrupted. So with some help from the Lobster Pot man, Rob Farley (Twitter: @rob_farley), we came built a .Net application that traversed through the affected table till it found a corrupt record, stored all the remaining fields, stripped the HTML from the original column, deleted the corrupt record and inserted a new corrected record.

Result, much happier client.

LHC has stable beams ...

... and the world didn't end!!

http://meltronx.com/lhcdatawide/index.html

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Yet another impressive view of Paris

http://www.gillesvidal.com/blogpano/paris.htm

Quick query to list which Reporting Services report the SQL Agent jobs relate to.

SELECT
  jb.[name] as [job_name]
  , cat.[name] as [report_name]
  , cat.[path] as [report_location]
  , sub.[description] as [sub_desc]
  , sub.[LastRunTime], sub.[LastStatus]
FROM (
    select 
      jb.[name]
      , replace(right(stp.[command]
        , charindex('=ataDtnevE@', reverse(stp.[command]))-1)
          , '''', '') as [SubscriptionID]
    from [msdb].[dbo].[sysjobs] jb
      inner join [msdb].[dbo].[sysjobsteps] stp
      on jb.job_id = stp.[job_id]
    where jb.[category_id] = 100
  ) jb
  JOIN [ReportServer].[dbo].[ReportSchedule] sch 
  ON jb.[SubscriptionID] = sch.[SubscriptionID]
    JOIN [ReportServer].[dbo].[Subscriptions] sub
    ON sch.[SubscriptionID] = sub.[SubscriptionID]
      JOIN [ReportServer].[dbo].[Catalog] cat
      ON sub.[report_oid] = cat.[itemid]

SQL Artwork

MS Premier Field Engineer Fabricio Catae posts a stunning piece of deadlock artwork.

I've heard of late trains ... but ...

Snapped this whilst I was waiting for my train home.

I think we can safely say that the trains never ran that late when Connex was running the system ... LOL

Paris @ 26 Gigapixels

http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html
“a stitching of 2346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354159x75570 px)”

What’s the signage on the building to the right of the red crane?

How many antennas does the black office building have on it?

What time is it by the clock on the bell tower?


Free Kudos to whoever gets all three correct.

Advanced SQL Training on the way ... hopefully

Paul Randal has blogged about the next set of classes that he and Kimberly will be presenting in April this year.

Last time they were in Australia I missed the course, but caught them at their user group presentation.

Hopefully, this time round I can grab a seat on the course.

DBA Survivor Name That Caption Contest

Thomas LaRock is running a a “Name That Caption” contest over at his DBA Survivor website promoting his upcoming book DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA of the same name. 

Here's my entry.

"Hmmm ... if I concentrate hard enough I can't hear that Access Developer outlining his next 'SQL Server' project"

or
"I wonder if anyone would mind if I stick the system views poster here."

Fwd: Important notice: Google Apps browser support

Users of older browsers, you are on notification, upgrade now  ...

Google Chrome
Apple Safari
Mozilla Firefox
Microsoft Internet Explorer

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <apps-noreply@google.com>
Date: Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 8:18 AM
Subject: Important notice: Google Apps browser support
To: philcart@gmail.com

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team


Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

--

Open Transactions with SQL text

Just trying to track down which spid is bashing my poor little SQL machine.

Quite coincidentally Paul Randall just blogged about a new script to show who has open transactions on the server.

Only problem is I want the same information in SQL 2000 land ... :(

Best I can come up with at the moment is,

   1:  select [spid], [blocked], [waittime], [lastwaittype]

   2:    , [waitresource], [dbid], [cpu], [physical_io]

   3:    , [memusage], [login_time], [last_batch], [open_tran]

   4:    , [status], [hostname], [program_name]

   5:  from master..sysprocesses

   6:  where [spid] > 51

   7:    and [blocked] > 0

   8:  order by [blocked], spid

   9:   

  10:  DECLARE @Handle binary(20)

  11:  SELECT @Handle = sql_handle FROM master..sysprocesses 

  12:  WHERE spid = 527  

  13:  SELECT * FROM ::fn_get_sql(@Handle)

Move files from sub-directory to root folder

Had a need to move a bunch of database backup files from sub-directories into a root folder so it was easier for my restore script to process them all. Came across this little gem and decided it really needed to go into my toolbox

for /f "tokens=5* skip=2" %i in ('dir *.bak ^| findstr "DIR"') do (move %i\*.* .)