It Depends - All Comments

re: Renaming Databases Posted on SQLServerCentral.com

Dugi — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:50:34 GMT

Nice info and very nice to know these things from the SQL Specialists!

Thnx Andy!

re: Tool Review: Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel

bkelley — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:06:23 GMT

It also doesn't work on Vista.

re: Listening on a Non Standard Port

bkelley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:30:15 GMT

And if you really want to give it a go, use dice to generate the port #. When we had a service go in, to prevent it being guessable based on knowing the implementers, we grabbed a bunch of 10-sided dice and rolled.

This prevents things like ports coming up on 1701 because a particular member of the team is a Star Trek fan (Enterprise is NCC-1701).

re: Transparent, Translucent, or Opaque? Whats Your Strategy?

dbenoit — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:09:45 GMT

Andy,

Great post and I couldn't agree more. I remeber having a manager that constantly told me all the woes of the company and the problems with upper management. I was constantly discouraged thinking that there was no real leadership in the organization. With that being said, there is a necessity to be positive on many things, not to ignore the negatives, we all know they are there, but to communicate the positive things as well.

I once had a friend who pulled out a blank piece of white paper and drew a small black dot on the center of it. Then he asked me "what do you see". I quickly replied "a black dot, of course". He said, "no, a big piece of white paper with a small black dot on it". Perspective is 90% of our attitude and as a company it is often better to present a positive perspective than a negative one.

So, thanks for the blog. Truly appreciate your comments.

David

re: Community Speakers/Leaders - Where's the ROI?

bkelley — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:30:55 GMT

For me it's #2. None of us got to where we are by ourselves. We had help along the way. It's true that the more help we have, the more we are capable of growing.

Every time I do a presentation or host a user group meeting I meet new folks who hopefully I've helped in some way or who I can help in the future. My hope is also that in meeting those folks I've established contacts with folks that may be able to help me in the future.

You come to realize that so many people are working on so many different things that when that question you don't know comes your way, perhaps a discussion with one of them will stick with you and you remember that Natali or John or Bill works with this sort of thing all the time. A quick phone call or email later and you've got the information you need to tackle the problem properly.

That's one of the greatest values in contributing to the community. When you do, the community will be there to help you when you need it.

re: Heroes? Probably Not

bkelley — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:19:29 GMT

Amen to the watering down of the word hero.

On a related note, the Medal of Honor citations:

www.history.army.mil/moh.html

The ones from Somalia are especially sobering when we consider the use of the word "hero." Those two men knew to be inserted likely meant their death. But they requested 3 times to be inserted to try and protect their comrades. They finally received permission but had to be inserted 100 meters away from the crash site and fight their way to it.

re: Managing & Professional Development Classes

Andy Warren — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:56:07 GMT

Will be interesting to see. I think those that want to learn will see the point in the investment, but only way to do is to try!

re: Managing & Professional Development Classes

bkelley — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:08:08 GMT

$99 sounds good. That way you can also send them home with a book or two related to the coursework.

re: Lists of Tools

Michael — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:14:30 GMT

The link no longer works. Do you have a page yet Andy?

re: Chipotle - A Model Business? Or Just Good Food?

Mike C — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:21:36 GMT

"you know why? We just spent too much time explaining to students who had not been there how to order from their menu!"

I think you might have just hit on the ultimate test for job applicants. If it takes you more than 5 minutes to order a burrito you'll be collecting unemployment a bit longer...

re: Thoughts on HTTP EndPoints, Schemas, and other niche features

Mike C — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:13:18 GMT

HTTP endpoints are actually pretty useful. You're right that Web Services are pretty easy to create using .NET, but not everyone uses .NET :) I've recently been put on a project that needs to use a lot of non-.NET development for an intranet and it needs to run off SQL Server. HTTP endpoints are definitely the easiest way to go in this non-.NET multi-O/S shop. I think the HTTP endpoints represent more of a replacement for equivalent SQLXML functionality than just a neat new acronym-laden feature :)

I haven't managed security on a schema level, but it sure does make it easier to group and manage related objects :) I agree that SSMS should group objects together under schema folders (or at least provide the option). On another note, we've been having some problems getting the Microsoft-supplied JDBC drivers to properly report SQL 2005 schema information. But that's another story :)

re: What's wrong with Linq to SQL

Arthur Fuller — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:15:40 GMT

I too am uneasy about Linq to SQL, and in particular about the short-shrift that stored procedures and table UDFs seem to be receiving. I'm old-school, perhaps; I have come to believe that anything the back end can do, the back end should do.

I'll keep learning it, but I'll fill the perceived gap by placing my focus on using sprocs and udfs with Linq.

Arthur

re: Free Ebook Chapter(Book) - Introducing SQL Server 2008

Freeebooksdownload — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:27:48 GMT

Woow great post thanks dude :)

re: IT Transparency, the intro!

Bill Prehl — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:37:21 GMT

Andy,

I've been trying to move into management in IT and it's been a struggle for the past 12 years because I see these exact behavioral issues with the service aspect of IT but could never pinpoint a solution. Also, I never had formal education in business but I do have two degrees in electrical engineering.

This method of being open I have found most useful in the past though some managers cringed when they found out I exposed a mistake I made. What I could never piece together was a process for letting the "customers" or "users" decide amongst themselves how to best divide the time up for the work to be done.

The burn-out in IT is truly because it's very difficult to peg the cost of a person's time based on their productivity. How to measure productivity is a moving target every day. You're option to provide a continuous list and forum provides everything for all parties. I believe IT gets paralyzed because they are so overwhelmed. I believe the user's don't understand the issue with getting their "small" request done quickly. If both sides can see the work load and the progress of work as time goes on (with mistakes) then there's an appreciation factor. IT appreciates the pat on the back when they do get something done and the user appreciates their request being completed. Both sides knowing what each other is up against.

Thanks for putting this out there.

re: Partitioning Part 4 Posted on SSC

joe — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:11:43 GMT

I agree about the article. It is very interesting an I would like to try it.

Is their a way to partition a table using a column from a table that we have a foreign key relationship with. We would want to partition both tables using the store_no values. That column can only be found on the orders table.

Orders (orderid int, store_no int, data etc)

OrderDetail (orderid int, data etc)

Is there a way to do this for the OrderDetail since it does not have this column? I was originally thinking of some sort of computed column or do we need to add the Store_no column to the OrderDetail.