I was reading an editorial by Jeff Pearlman who is a sports writer for Sports Illustrated and his article resonated with me – which is not to say that I have experienced his problem, per se, but that I have certainly noticed it as an issue as I peruse various other sites and forums. Essentially, he detailed his experiences with a couple of exceedingly rude internet users (trolls, for lack of a better term) and how they were when they believed they were anonymous and then how they became when he tracked them down.

Product Selection: 1: Identifying Needs 2: Requirements and Scoring 3: Evaluation 4: Review Once we have the purpose of the product selection defined, it’s time to move on to defining the characteristics we need or want from our product. Up until this point in the process we have talked to people one-on-one or in small groups. Now that we have identified the core need or needs the product must fulfill, we are ready to expand that into the list of requirements and features by incorporating input from the wider group of affected people.

Ok I admit VB.Net is a weird language and one wonders where the designers got their inspiration from. Let’s see how we can initialize an array while letting the compiler infer the type. In C# that would be. csharp var stringarray = new[] { "test", "test" }; In VB.Net this is. vbnet Dim stringarray = {"test", "test"} Which might be slightly better and shorter than the C# version. Now lets see the syntax for when we want to specify the type.

I think Twitter is a valued resource and I take it seriously when telling other professionals that they should be utilizing it. At times, the day requires the comedy and relaxing feel that we can get from people that understand the work that we do day in and day out. Other times such resources like the SQLHELP hash tag are absolutely crucial to problems that need several minds turning in order to resolve problems quickly.

Using ALTER DATABASE and MODIFY FILE you can reset the metadata in the master database for renaming physical mdf and ldf files. This however does not actually change the physical file name itself on disk. To fix that, you are typically required to change the metadata in master and then manually change the physical files on disk after taking the database offline. Then bring the database online and the task is complete.

In one of my previous posts where I made an HTMLLayout for Log4Net Wim ten Brink commented that I should use XML with xsl instead. AS I always listen to my followers. I did so swiftly. Here is the XslLayout class I created, Yes I know that there is an XMLLayout class available but that isn’t as good as the one I have. ```vbnet Imports log4net.Layout Imports System.Text Namespace Logging.FileLog Public Class XslLayout Inherits LayoutSkeleton

My fellow blogger Ted Kreuger posted this powershell thing where he wants to remove the NOLOCk keyword from a statement (I have no idea why but he must have a good reason). So I commented that he could perhaps have done it with linq instead of regex. I was mistaken linq has nothing to do with this. Regex is evil. So I set up a testcase, I didn’t feel like doing it in but in csharp, just for fun.

Why do you make unreadable logfiles? I was talking to myself there, me and myself tend to have such conversations a lot lately. Anyway, we digress. I used to have some simple output for my logfiles. [Header started logging at 3/02/2011 13:20:38] 2011-02-03 13:20:48,003 [1] WARN Logger [TDB2009.View.Menu.Winforms.Startup.StartUp] - Is this warning on? [footer] If you put that in debugging mode you will end up with a lot of files and not much of it will be readable.

Pivoting and Unpivoting data has been one of the parts of tsql that has been eluding my grasp for a while now. I’ve seen plenty of examples for both of these, but none of those examples really helped me in understanding exactly what’s going on. We have a wiki article for each here on LTD, Pivot and Unpivot, but again these don’t tell me a whole lot about what’s going on, just the before and after pictures.

The big man with the camera, Pat Wright (Blog | Twitter) is holding T-SQL Tuesday this month. The topic this month is Automation with T-SQL or with PowerShell (or a mix of both). Most know that when I say automation, SSIS is the first thing to come to mind. I’ve taken SSIS and abused and tuned it to automate just about every DBA task that is known to SQL Server.