Author Archive
Friday, April 25th, 2008
Making Our Dollars Talk
Last year, when our home briefly went without Microsoft Windows in our unsuccessful Mac experiment, one of the applications I had the most difficult time replacing was Microsoft Money. I had been using it for 3+ years to track our net worth and experiment a little with budgeting. I tried using Quicken for the Mac, [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Other by Shane
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Tactics or Toxin?
I love seeing companies trying unconventional ways to motivate their employees to keep them healthy, happy, and more productive.
The folks at 37 Signals have always been pushing this envelope. They have a small office in Chicago, but less than half of their (dozen or so) employees work there with the rest are spread out [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Other by Shane
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Mettler Thought Train, Volume 2
I might need to come up with more material to blog about so that this doesn’t become a list of articles that somebody else if feeding me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=octMaIKiSUA
No Comments » - Posted in Other by Shane
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Mike Mettler’s Thought Train, Volume 1
A friend of mine from a way back, Mike Mettler, broadcasts these URLs every once in a while through his GMail profile. Mike is a smart guy, and the articles usually deal with some issue that is out there simmering but hasn’t come to a boil yet. They lay out a problem (often one that [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Other by Shane
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Boynton Goes Berserk
My almost two year-old daughter, Dora, loves to read Sandra Boynton.
She loves the pictures. She loves to laugh at all the punchlines. Her
recent favorite is Philadelphia Chickens, which is a book/CD combo by
Ms. Boynton. Dora asks for the book by the name “Cows” which is the
title of the first song. I think I speak for [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Other by Shane
Monday, September 17th, 2007
File Under: Reporting Services Tricks
Wondering which SQL Job runs which subscription? Here’s how to find out.
select a.name, d.name, d.path, c.description, c.laststatus, c.lastruntime
from msdb.dbo.sysjobs a
join reportserver..reportschedule b on a.name=cast(b.scheduleid as nvarchar(255))
join reportserver..subscriptions c on b.subscriptionid=c.subscriptionid
join reportserver..catalog d on c.report_oid=d.itemid
order by c.lastruntime desc
No Comments » - Posted in SQL Server by Shane
Monday, July 2nd, 2007
Faster Backups AND Smaller Files
Now that our datawarehouse database is over 250GB, using the built-in SQL Server tools are not an option. I have experience with Veritas BackupExec and NetBackup, and here is my typical experience: backups are scheduled overnight and usually take the entire night. Restores are no faster.
Here’s a product that’s worth looking in to: Idera SQLSafe. [...]