Tonight, I’m presenting to a CISQ 250 class at Drury University. The topic of the presentation is “Alternatives to Relational Databases”.
The following is my presentation in SlideShare.net:
SQL Presentation for Springfield .NET Users Group
Tonight, I gave a presentation to the Springfield .NET Users Group. I chose to present on SQL Server 2008 Development for Programmers. I tried to keep it to a level 200 type class.
The following is my presentation in SlideShare.net:
PCI training equals lessons in how to hack
Today at work, all developers were required to take an all-day training in PCI. This is the second such session that I’ve attended since I was hired. It’s all very interesting to learn about, however, it really boils down to hacking. They are teaching us all the methods that we (our websites) can be hacked. The surprising part is how much my co-workers already know about how to attack a site. We discussed how we would attack something and then talked about the pros and cons for each type. All in all, great way to spend a day at work.
New addition to the family
It’s been entirely too long since my last post. The last time I posted I had just started my new job and was blogging about the experience and silly setup reminders for myself. It’s been about 9 months and I am still loving Expedia! I have a great management team supporting me. And they like to have fun; the company held an off-site in Las Vegas, at the Palazzo for three days. It really is the most challenging and rewarding position I’ve had in my career. However, outside of work, I’ve had a lot going on, to say the least.
In January, we welcomed our 4th child into our family. She has been keeping us all very busy. Now that she’s 7 weeks old now, she is just starting to smile and coo a bit. I just wanted to share a quick picture of one of those rare moments that her face just lit up.
Besides the birth, we recently listed our home for sale. It’s surprisingly difficult to fit a family of six into a three bedroom house. We’ve also discovered that having four children causes you to outgrow vehicles as well. :) Guess I’ll be shopping for a large SUV soon (or maybe a short bus, HA).
If that wasn’t enough, I’ve also been finishing up about a year long contract for some Business Intelligence software for a company in the SW US. With an extra 15-20 hours / week, it will be a needed relief to have it finalized. It’s a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) front end, C# middle, connecting to SQL Server database warehouse. I have to say I’ve really enjoyed developing WPF over Windows Forms. Working with XAML, the development cycle went very quickly.
Looking to the future, I have to admit, I’ve already got my next project lined up. I’m going online for this one and tackling the MVC pattern. Stay tuned. It should be a fun experience as I’m going to try to adopt the 37signals way of simple design. Their REWORK book has been bouncing around my head for a while now and I’d like to start a new project with it in mind.
Won a PluralSight Subscription
Tonight, at my local .NET User’s Group meeting, I was lucky enough to win a 1-year subscription to PluralSight On-Demand! The subscription was one of the give-aways that the group was doing. I am really fortunate to have won it, too. With my new job that focuses on Database side of development, I’ve been getting a little rusty at my coding skillset. The standard subscription lets me have full access to over 70 .NET Courses, which is $499 value! I guess I have one more thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. I can’t wait to start watching the how-to videos and courses. Thank you to my local .NET User’s Group for having awesome swag.
Where is the Immediate Window in Visual Studio?
Whenever I get a clean install of Visual Studio, I can never find the menu for displaying the Immediate Window for debugging code. The keyboard shortcut for it is: Ctl + Alt + I
This post is probably more for my own reference later, but maybe it will satisfy someone’s search.
Turning a new leaf with a career change
I started a new job this week. I am working for Expedia, Inc now as a Database Development Engineer (or DB Dev, for short). So far, I am really enjoying the opportunity. The people are really great and have a real entusiasm for what they do.
It’s a quicker pace for development releases than I’m used to, but it seems like they have a really good system of checks and balances to ensure the process is flawless. I am learning that “Uptime” is the most important factor and that everything else comes in as second priority. That’s such a different mentality to me. My background has always been in the client-server world. So we could shut the system down to make our changes/updates and then give the All Clear signal to let everyone in. But not with a website that is running 24x7x365. It the site is down even a few minutes, that’s lost revenue, which is unacceptable.
The work is still similar from a database perspective, but every little change is scrutinized. Can’t update a table in a large batch, it has to be done in iterations of 100 records or less so that it doesn’t lock too many data pages.
Today, I was writing a multi-threaded query stress tool. It’s going to be something that will compare all the CPU, read/write IO, & memory metrics for a defined number of iterations and threads. We will be able to scale it up to simulate a real load on the database server. We have to be concisous of every little change we implement, because a small change can get magnified when 50,000 users hit the system.
Regardless of the details, I am LOVING my career change. It’s refreshing to change everything.
Too many “To Dos” and not enough “Dones”
I love taking on new projects, and I’m a do-it-yourself kind of person. If there is something that needs to be done around the house, I don’t hire it out, I do it myself. It’s not just physical stuff, either. That DIY mentality applies to everything in my life … doing taxes, starting businesses, writing websites/software, & designing logos. I really try to tackle all of these things myself.
However, as of lately, I’ve been feeling stretched really thin; too thin, actually. My “To Do” list hasn’t been getting items moved over to the “Done” side very quickly. Two of the bigger items on that list have been a pair of websites, my personal website and my wife’s business website, that both need similar functionality. I’ve written both from scratch and included a lot of really cool features on both. But the features are always taking me more & more time to add which is taking away from being able to get anything else done. The biggest feature is a blog engine. Now I know there are a ton of free blogging services out there, but I was really enjoying writing my own and figuring out all the nuances. And it has been a really fun challenge. But I need to let them go.
So I am deciding to change my focus a bit and give up control of having to do everything myself. That means that I will be transitioning both of the websites over to WordPress. It’ll cost a little bit more money than what it currently does, but the opportunity cost of being able to work on other things will far outweigh cost of switching over. Plus I’ll have more time to actually write content for the blog instead of the piping for it. And my wife will absolutely love the WordPress app for her iPhone. That alone should be the biggest reason to move.
With this change I will be losing some of my pride of creativity and accomplishment, but honestly, I’ll get those back with my next project. Move two more “To Dos” over to the “Done” column.
AutoRecover SQL Scripts
This morning, when I came into work, I discovered that Windows Update had graciously restarted my machine for me. No big deal. But wait, then I realized I had some SQL work that I hadn’t saved yet. NOOOOOO!!! I know, I know, … always save your work. But yesterday, I didn’t. So you can imagine how irritated I was to discover that all of that hard work was gone. Or so I thought.
A co-worker heard me getting mad at myself and chimed in that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has an autorecover feature. WHAT!? Yep, when ever you start typing a query in SSMS, a file is automatically created and saves itself every 5 minutes. The location of this AutoRecover document is located in “\My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Backup Files\Solution [n]\”. The [n] represents an integer that corresponds to how many SSMS IDE windows you have open. I only had one IDE open, with two query windows open, so I had a “\Solution 1\” folder with two files in it: ~AutoRecover.~vs47E8.sql & ~AutoRecover.~vsD5FD.sql.
Try it out. Open the folder mentioned above and open a new SSMS IDE and Query window and start typing out a quick SELECT. After about 5 minutes, you will see a new file prefixed with “~AutoRecover.~vsXXXX.sql”. The X’s are alphanumeric values that change with every file. The new file will get auto saved in 5 min increments from there on. When you close SSMS or a query window and it asks you if you want to save, click No, and watch the auto-generated file delete itself.
Wow, that was a HUGE relief. SSMS 2005 and higher has this feature built in. Thank you Microsoft for saving me from my own carelessness.
Free eBook: Defensive Database Programming
Simple-Talk Publishing has released a new free eBook: Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server, by Alex Kuznetsov.
The goal of Defensive Programming is to produce resilient code that responds gracefully to the unexpected. To the SQL Server programmer, this means T-SQL code that behaves consistently and predictably in cases of unexpected usage, doesn’t break under concurrent loads, and survives predictable changes to database schemas and settings.
Too often as developers, we stop work as soon as our code passes a few basic tests to confirm that it produces the ‘right result’ in a given use case. We do not stop to consider what other possible ways in which the code might be used in the future, or how our code will respond to common changes to the database environment, such as a change in the database language setting, or a change to the nullability of a table column, and so on.
This book is filled with practical, realistic examples of the sorts of problems that beset database programs, including:
- Changes in database objects, such as tables, constraints, columns, and stored procedures.
- Changes to concurrency and isolation levels.
- Upgrades to new versions of SQL Server.
- Changes in requirements.
- Code reuse.
- Problems causing loss of data integrity.
- Problems with error handling in T-SQL.
You can download the eBook in PDF format here.
