SQL Server, performance, data, analytics
admin More than 6 million LinkedIn passwords stolen:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/06/technology/linkedin-password-hack/index.htm?hpt=hp_t3
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/security/3362143/how-to-change-a-linkedin-password/
Loved this bit:
Countless passwords on the list contain the word “linkedin.”
Log into LinkedIn and click your name in the top right of the LinkedIn page.
Select “Settings” from the dropdown and choose “Change” next to Password.
Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Thurs June 7th where Dr. Scott Hollier will present on Web and Application Accessibility. The Federal government’s National Transition Strategy and accompanying state government policies now require that all government websites meet accessibility criteria. Come along to hear Dr Scott Hollier from Media Access Australia explain how you can make sure your web development complies with the government’s accessibility requirements, learn how people with disabilities are likely to interact with your work and how the likely impact of future Web standards.
Scott Hollier is a Project Manager and the Western Australia Manager for Media Access Australia, a not-for-profit, public benevolent institution. Scott’s work focuses on making computers and Internet-related technologies accessible to people with
disabilities. Scott also represents MAA on the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation primarily responsible for developing and promoting access to media through technology for people with disabilities.
Scott has completed a PhD titled ‘The Disability Divide: an examination into the needs of computing and Internet-related technologies on people who are blind or vision impaired’, and has a background in Computer Science and a wealth of experience in both the information technology and not-for-profit sectors. Scott is legally blind and as such understands the importance of access at a personal level.
A quick reminder that Jake Ginnivan will be presenting this Thurs 3rd May on Rich Client MVC (MVVM+C) architecture and will demonstrate some of the common issues (and solutions) encountered in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 development.
More details here.
Just a quick reminder that Michael Minutillo will be presenting on ASP.NET MVC tomorrow night (Thurs, 5th April) at the Perth .NET User Group. More details here: http://perthdotnet.blogspot.com.au/
I’m in the process of moving the old Perth .NET web site and setting up google groups. The new site is here (albeit without the new domain mapping): http://perthdotnet.blogspot.com.au/
I’ll be sending out an email presently to invite everyone currently on the mailing list to join the group.
The future of application development lies in the web. Customers demand web sites and applications that are more interactive, perform faster, can service more concurrent users, and render across a wider array of devices than ever before. And they want new features. And they want them every day. In this session Mike will take you on a guided tour through the ASP.NET MVC stack with stops along the way to look at the new features and improvements found in the version 4 beta that will aid you in rapidly developing web applications on the Microsoft stack.
Mike Minutillo is a Senior Developer/Software Architect at The Birchman Group in Perth. In 2000, Mike started writing .NET software to fund his university studies and has been an active member of the .NET community ever since. Mike is a regular attendee at the Perth .NET Community of Practice where he has given presentations on new features of C#, ASP.NET MVC and Test-Driven Philosophy. Mike is also the co-author of Professional Visual Studio 2010. You can contact Mike at his blog http://codermike.com
I’ll be presenting a TSQL developer focused talk at the Perth .NET User Group tomorrow (Thurs 1st March, 5:30pm). I’ll cover a few techniques for speeding up and improving TSQL code.
If you haven’t noticed, the UG web site is currently down (due to circumstances beyond my control). I’m trying to get it back up, but it might take a little while…
This HTML5 introduction, Dive into HTML5, also contains an interesting account of how certain HTML features evolved.
For the most comprehensive read and all the details: HTML5 specifications (still being drafted).
Out of the box, SQL Server’s maintenance plans enable you to set up common maintenance tasks such as running a CHECKDB, backing up up databases and logs, rebuilding indexes etc.
In terms of rebuilding indexes, there are two flavours: a reorganise and a full-blown rebuild (Reorganizing and Rebuilding Indexes). Reorganising an index is usually done when the index is not heavily fragmented.
It is not uncommon to find a maintenance plan that first full rebuilds all indexes (regardless of fragmentation level, but more on that in a moment), and then subsequently updates all statistics. Not only is this unnecessary, it is actually worse than simply rebuilding all indexes! The update statistics task samples your data, whereas a full index rebuild also updates the associated statistics but does so by performing a FULL SCAN of your data. That’s right: updating statistics with the default setting of sample after a full index rebuild will leave you with (potentially) less accurate statistics.
Rather than rebuilding all indexes regardless whether they need it or not, Ola Hallengren’s maintenance script contains a production tried-and-tested stored procedure SQL Server Index and Statistics Maintenance for rebuilding and reorganizing indexes and updating statistics. It has ability to run for a set period to fit into tight maintenance windows, set fragmentation threshold levels, and update statistics, such as unindexed column statistics that are not updated as part of an index rebuild. Highly recommended.
1) Has the table schema been examined to minimise storage space per row? Whilst obvious, it is surprising how much can be gained from this. (I’ve managed to halve the row sizes in a previous project’s data warehouse)
Techniques include using the smallest data types possible:
a) Use varchar instead of nvarchar.
b) Use smalldatetime unless you need the precision. [The smalldatetime datatype is accurate to the nearest minute, whereas datetime has a precision of 3.33 milliseconds.]
2) Turn on database compression (this has a CPU overhead, but can reduce total database size by over half).
3) Turn on backup compression.
4) Ensure instant file initialisation is turned on.
5) * Use multiple file groups to manage backups.
6) * Place critical tables in PRIMARY file group to enable piecemeal restore (SQL Server 2005 onwards)
7) Use partitioning to break a table out into several pieces that can be stored on different sets of drives: rule of thumb is around the ’20 – 30 million rows per partition’ mark. Of course, this somewhat depends on the ‘natural’ partitioning key range (for example, 1 month per partition)
8) Have a clear idea of your high availability requirements (maximum downtime) up front, and validate your disaster recovery plans.
Refs.