Forty-eight hours ago, I was a bundle of nerves. I was loading up the car with Tech on Tap swag, shirts, and gear. I had been working towards this day for almost a year with Derek Schauland (twitter | blog) and Mark Cyrulik (twitter | blog), and having it all come together was nerve-wracking. Would attendees show up? Would the speakers be engaging and entertaining? Would the sponsors consider the event the best investment of their money possible?
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.
SpecFlow is a .Net library that allows us to describe user expectations in a consistent Domain-Specific Language that can be wired for automatic execution. By writing executable tests in a human readable manner, our tests can serve as a bridge between the users expectations and the code we produce to meet them. This post will walk through the benefits and high level details of these methods before diving into a practical example of implementing several tests against the MVC Music Store site from my Continuous Delivery project.
Article, Automating Index Statistics Collection, went over a method to automate running a script authored by Jason Strate. The script is a comprehensive collection of index statistics and usage details that allows a DBA or designated administrator of SQL Server one place to go for review. SSIS was used to execute the script on a list of SQL Server Instances and databases specified in flat files. The overall design of the SSIS Package was OK.
I suspect that if you are reading this blog then you are using an IoC container to resolve your dependencies. If you do not and you just read this blog because you think I’m an awesome guy then that is fine too, but you should now take the time to learn how to use IoC/DI. For those of you using IoC, I wonder how many of you have this. ```vbnet Public Interface IInterface1 Sub DoSomething() End Interface
I had the distinct pleasure of attending my first MADPASS meeting last night, January, 25th. The drive to the Madison SQL Server User Group from the Illinois, Wisconsin border wasn’t that bad and well worth it. I was able to catch up with the Grandfather of SSIS, Andy Leonard. Andy was in Chicago the same week of the meeting and was nice enough to speak at the meeting. Andy is one of the best presenters I know and enjoy sitting in his sessions more than most.
Undeniably, the largest impact a database administrator can have on a database server’s performance is with indexing. One index can mean the difference between a 30 minute overall time of execution or a few seconds overall time of execution. At the same time, indexing can have a negative impact on overall database server performance. This negative impact can be from too many indexes, overlapping indexes, or indexes that are not defined correctly.
There are a lot of RDBMS out there. It would be nice to assume that any one is perfect for or can be adapted to any situation, but that simply isn’t true. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses. When I am doing initial research on a database project, there are a few properties I will look into and questions I will ask to determine what is the best fit for that project.
In the previous article, “Estimating Mean Uptime for Team-based uptime measurements” uptime planning was discussed in some detail. The calculation you could use to set team goals was provided. All of these goals in general are for helping gauge how we are doing and where we have growth areas, but how do we even use something like database mirroring with our applications? In most .NET-driven development, and when a SQL Server database is behind the application, a connection string is involved.
In October, I mentioned I was working on a new adventure: Tech On Tap. The first event is just days away – Saturday, January 28, 2012. What is going to make Tech On Tap so different – and so great? We’re going to have attendees from a mix of disciplines. It’s not just SQL people, or system administrators, or developers. We are inviting people from a variety of roles.
With high availability, the least amount of time data is unavailable, the higher the up-time percentage that is achieved. Uptime is a period of time in which equipment is available for use by users. Even a 5 minute failover time can have a negative impact on an uptime goal of 99.999% availability. Each point of failure that can cause downtime should be considered in the overall equation for uptime. Since each component has a specific requirement and must be functioning properly to deliver the source to the requestor, this is a way to calculate achievements based on an entire team including server, network, and data.