If you love something… set it free

Posted on February 27th, 2009 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

Ian Davis excellent presentation from code4lib serves as a timely reminder of what the Semantic Web is, and why it’s important.

It has just the right amount of Buzz Words – The Network Effect, Walled Gardens, Blue Oceans and Islands of data all get a mention.

I used to work at Talis and they’ve been banging on about this sort of stuff for years. And who can blame them? It’s difficult to be dismissive of a project backed by the inventor of the World Wide Web.

If you love something… set it free
View more presentations from Ian Davis. (tags: opendata data)

Because I always forget – SQL Server 2005 Logins

Posted on February 27th, 2009 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

How to transfer the logins and the passwords between instances of SQL Server 2005.

On Source Server
Create stored procedure sp_help_revlogin from code on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918992/.
Run the stored procedure and copy the output.

On Destination Server
Paste the Output from source server into a query window and run it.

Job done!


Because I always forget – Export all SPNs in a domain

Posted on February 18th, 2009 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

To export all the Service Principle Names (SPNs) from a domain use

ldifde -f spns.txt -d DC=resource,DC=domain,DC=local -l serviceprincipalname

LDIFDE queries any available domain controller to retrieve/update AD information.

More information about LDIFDE can be found here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555634


Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Partner Technology Day

Posted on February 16th, 2009 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

Late last week I attended a SQL 2008 Partner Technology Day.

Here are some brief notes on some of the features that stood out.

  • Resource Governor – Allows you to ring fence workload execution for example you can give user X 20% of CPU and 256mb memory. The presenter actually demo’d this and showed changing a users resources on the fly. Powerful stuff.
  • Backup Compression – Improved network throughput for Database Mirroring and Log Shipping though at the cost of CPU usage.
  • FILESTREAM – You can now store blobs on an NTFS file system rather than in the database – overcomes some of the performance problems with storing Binary Data.
  • Clustering – You can now have sixteen nodes per cluster (up from 8). Also chained setup and Rolling upgrades make installation and maintenance a lot easier.
  • Apparently there are no plans for a Load Balancing solution which is a bummer – you still have to rely on 3rd party apps.
  • Oh and Management Studio now has IntelliSense which is cool.

Useful Resource Govenor Resources.

CSS SQL Server Engineers – Resource Governor Questions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/01/10/sql-server-2008-resource-governor-questions.aspx

Technet on Resource Governor
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933866.aspx

Technet on limiting CPU for a compressed backup
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280384.aspx

Troubleshooting Resource Governor
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc627395.aspx

Resource Governor Demo
http://blogs.technet.com/sqlos/archive/2007/12/14/part-1-anatomy-of-sql-server-2008-resource-governor-cpu-demo.aspx

Useful High Availability Resources

How to: Create a New SQL Server Failover Cluster (Setup)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179530(SQL.100).aspx

How to: Add or Remove Nodes in a SQL Server Failover Cluster (Setup)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191545(SQL.100).aspx

Windows Server 2008 High Availability
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/high-availability.aspx