I decided to take a look at my Has FireFox lost its Mojo, are Firefox user jumping ship to Chrome? post to compare the browser stats. In that post I wrote the following So what will happen to Firefox will they ever pass 25% or is this a downward spiral and within a year Chrome will have that 25% and Firefox will be at 15% or so? With all the new stuff like the Google’s App Store that Google is adding to Chrome its usage will have to grow fast.
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.
You can never have enough powershell. And it’s even cooler if you can have it straight in Visualstudio so that you don’t have to leave your most hated/loved IDE. Studioshell is such another addin that makes it possible to use powershell. You can download studioshell on codeplex (Its the big green button that say download, just in case you were wondering what to click). After you install it you will see this In your View menu.
The second half of February is going to be busy for this geek grrl! I am presenting three times in one week, then capping that off with a trip to Seattle, WA to see friends and attend SQL Saturday #108. Cannot. Wait! The Presentations Tuesday, February 21, 6:00 pm Central I-380 Corridor (East Iowa) SQL Server User Group I’ll be presenting via Live Meeting for my friends in East Iowa. Hopefully someone there brings construction paper and crayons!
Few days ago my colleague showed me strange behavior of SQL Server’s 2008 RTM MERGE statement. Although this is corrected in SP1 1 or more probably in CU1 (there is bug solved in CU1 connected to this – imo), I do believe its worth to be mentioned. If you try to update parent column (column referenced by foreign key) even with the same value it fails with message “The MERGE statement conflicted with the REFERENCE constraint” when index used for FK relationship is NONCLUSTERED.
Average Joe. An average day. An average salary. An average run. An average house. You hear about “averages” a lot. But what does it really mean? And why is this important to a SQL Server professional? Being Average An average is the “middle” value in a set of data values. When talking about or calculating an average, most people consider using the “mean”. However, there are also “median” and “mode” to take into consideration.
A little over a year ago I wrote an article that discussed calling SSIS packages from stored procedures. One of the objectives of that article was to discuss why enabling xp_cmdshell can be dangerous in terms of potential security risks. To further that discussion, this article will focus directly on xp_cmdshell by discussing how extended procedures function and the risks that come with utilizing them with the newer versions of SQL Server.
For almost as long as I’ve been at my current job, we’ve been pushing for some kind of acceptance criteria from our QA group, both to serve as a contract for what we are estimating and to make the handoff of stories from dev to QA smoother. With the most recent large set of functionality we’ve been working on, we’ve been getting these much more consistently. We don’t always have the criteria at time of estimation, but we have been getting them by the time we work on the story.
Many times I am given an Excel file, or have a data source that makes it easy to paste into Excel, and I need to use the data in my database for a one-time purpose of updating or checking other data. It’s not worth creating an SSIS package, and it’s not even worth using a wizard in SSMS. So generally I use bcp as a very fast method. To do that, I quickly create a staging table in my database, then save the Excel file as tab-delimited.
As part of the Continuous Delivery project I embarked on late last year, I created 4 separate jobs in Jenkins to serve as steps in my pipeline. Some of these jobs are fairly complex and, while I could probably rebuild them from the information in my blog posts, I thought it would make more sense to make some backups. But I hate doing backups. And I hate digging through backups to find something.
The Nuget Package Manager console is a great way to do anything powershell straight from the Visual studio IDE. And that little window supports just about anything you can do with powershell. It can even use posh-git. Inspired by the post the Hanseldude did I went out and tried if I could get that to work. And it’s actually very easy. I downloaded the posh-git files from github and saved them on my C drive under posh-git.