I had to do some performance testing for an upcoming MSSQLTips article and I thought I’d share the framework I used in a blog post. First of all we have to log start and end dates of the package to a table so we can easily calculate the duration a package took to finish. This can probably be calculated from the SSIS catalog as well, but I was a bit too busy lazy to find out how to do this.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
I use a continuous testing tool named NCrunch for all of my .Net code. In fact, NCrunch has spoiled me so much that manually running tests is bordering on painful. I’ve gotten used to doing absolutely nothing and still having the latest build results, test results, code coverage, highlighted execution paths for failed tests, and little hover notices on each line that passed an exception. Make a change, magic happens.
Did you know that there was a breaking change in Nancy 0.22? Did you check before updating that nuget package? If you answered no to the previous questions than you are probably me and did a booboo in production where you freaked someone else out, despite it taking them a few days to figure out it was no longer working. My code wasn’t phased by the change probably because VB.Net is superior and they use C# (le sigh).
When you have Storage Analytics transaction logging turned on, it produces transaction log files for each service call you make to blob, table, or queue service. Unfortunately it captures these in multiple files per hour, stored in a folder hierarchy by service (blob, queue, table), year, month, day, and hour. Trying to dig through these files or combine them into a single excel file can be time consuming and, unfortunately, is one of the first things you will be asked if you submit a storage-related support ticket.
It’s T-SQL Tuesday! This month, Michael Swart has challenged us to argue against a popularly-held opinion about SQL Server. “Arguing Against Popular Opinion” sounds like the title of my autobiography. You’ve been told time and again to back up your SQL Server system databases – master, msdb, and model. I’m here to tell you it’s not that important, especially if you have a large number of SQL Server instances. The information in those databases should be documented, scripted, and available in other locations, not just contained here.
Recently I was designing a simple Power View report on top of a multi-dimensional SSAS cube. Out of the box, one of the tables looked like this: For readability purposes, a 1000 separator is added to the numeric value. However, the comma was used, as is common in the United States. In Belgium (and other countries in Europe), we use the single point as the 1000 separator and the comma as the decimal separator.
The automatic deployment option of Azure Web Sites is really cool and demos well. A few months ago I was curious how far I could push it, whether I could replace more complex projects that I currently deploy from my build server. I had read a couple posts on unit testing during deployment, but so far had not seen anyone take it all the way to interface testing. With tools like CassiniDev, Phantom, and Selenium, this seemed like a real possibility.
Jasmine 2.0 has changed how it loads and executes tests, using a boot script now to handle the details. If you try to plug some require() calls into the sample SpecRunner.html page, Jasmine will be done and finished before the require() statement loads the test modules and their dependencies. The problem is that RequireJS loads the dependencies asynchronously, but the standard boot script for Jasmine runs when window.onload is called.
DISCLAIMER I recently enrolled myself in the O'Reilly Blogger Review program, which basically allows me to get one O'Reilly eBook for free per month so I can review it on my blog. This works in both ways of course: I get free eBooks while they're still hot from the press (figuratively speaking of course) and the books get some extra coverage on social media. A nice bonus is that Microsoft Press books are also published through O'Reilly, so it is possible I can get my hands early on new SQL Server books.
If you haven't noticed lately, Power Map has gone into General Availability as of 25 of February 2014. It comes along with service pack 1 of Office 2013, which you can download here. There are two ways of getting this update: Downloading and installing service pack 1, aka the old-school method. Simply having the Click-To-Run Office 2013 version and making sure you have updates enabled. Melissa Coates explains the difference in this blog post: Getting New Power Pivot Features & Other Office 2013 Updates.