Today is the two year anniversary of Less Than Dot, time is flying by so fast. I would like to list some stats about the site and also list the most popular blogposts, wiki pages and forum posts. Site stats Browsers Internet Explorer <td> 43.64% </td> Firefox <td> 40.585% </td> Chrome <td> 10.55% </td> Safari <td> 2.30% </td> Opera <td> 2.02% </td> As you can see Internet Explorer is the number one browser, last year it was FireFox. Chrome is still number 3 but it doubled its share. FireFox is the big loser, I wrote about that already here: Has FireFox lost its Mojo, are FireFox user jumping ship to Chrome?

Yes it has been 2 years since we launched this website. But I think the we started this thing about a year earlier. In the beginning mostly talking about it and then someone (damber) decided it was time for action and we set up the website. First we did this on a development server. First we had to choose the platform we were going to use. That was easy since money was a problem we choose a linux platform. Which meant php was also an obvious choice.

A virtual domain controller (DC) can be both a powerful and lightweight addition to your virtual lab. A central AD implementation not only gives you another set of services to work with, it also provides a more realistic environment with the power of domain accounts and policies that will be useful when you start working with multi-server setups. This article will walk through the creation of a basic 2008 R2 Domain Controller. Technical Area: Accidental Systems Administrator Level of Difficulty: Additional Articles:Virtual Lab entry on the LTD Wiki Terminology There are some terms that are commonly used in relation to AD or a Domain Controller that will appear in this and other documents:

I’ve been approached on the web, in the SQL Community and in person several times with the question: “My Reporting Services instance loads Report Manager extremely slow. Why?” There are a few common primary causes of this. One is the instance being located on a DMZ and behind policies that cause the slow load times. I’m not a network guru and haven’t played in that field for 7-8 years so I can’t give you a lot of ideas to fix it. I can say, check it if you are on that landscape and getting the slow load times.

Today I decided it was time to set some of my projects to use .Net 4 instead of .Net 3.5 and I felt the pain. First, I had some trouble with my barcodereader framework which was built for .Net 1.1. No problem, I quickly changed it over with another framework I like better and which is built for .Net 4.0. Then I committed and I broke the built :-(. The test projects I had converted to .net 4.0. would not build anymore.

My favorite topic, “The SHRINK!” The topic really does cause pain. Shrinking a file in SQL Server is inherently a terrible action to take. However, we all know that in some cases when maintenance was never setup and recovery models were not properly chosen, the need does come up. An interesting topic came up on LTD in the forums regarding moving an overloaded and unmaintained log file to a server that had less disk space than the original. The first inclination would be to shrink the log and then backup/restore it to the new location. Seeing as the full backup consists of the data and just enough log to recover, the assumption would be that you would only get this in the new database. However, in this case, shrinking the log will not be the last step in the process. The initial size of the log will also need to change.

I have been using Chrome for over a year now and have been very happy with it. Yesterday version 5 was released, you can get it here: http://www.google.com/chrome I decided to look at some stats for this site and compared April of this year to April of last year. The image below has this information. As you can see FireFox lost about 10% while Chrome gained 9% and Safari gained almost 1%. So what is going on, are the early adapters switching to Chrome from FireFox? Take a look at the NetMarket stats

Sometimes you have to “empty” the database, meaning you have to keep everything except data. One way is to script “everything”, drop DB and create it again. Another way is to delete data table by table, taking care of FK constraints, or to drop all FKs, then to remove data and at the end to restore FKs. Here are 2 scripts for creating SQL code to: a) Drop all existing FKs b) Truncate tables

A virtual database server provides you the ability to not only work on database-relate tools and services, but also to try out hundreds of vendor products throughout the market that require a database backend. This article will walk through a basic database setup for SQL Server 2008 R2 on a virtual machine using mostly standard installation options. This first installation will be limited to basic settings and a virtual harddrive, leaving us ready to customize the setup for later uses. Technical Area: Accidental Systems Administrator, Accidental Database Administrator Level of Difficulty: Additional Articles:Virtual Lab entry on the LTD Wiki

I have a bunch of processes that run at then end of the day. Some of these processes are configured dynamic since table names, server names, database names and a whole bunch of other stuff might change. So you might have a (over simplified here) table like this Typeid TypeName TypeValue 1 ActiveServerName SQLDenisDB1 1 DatabaseName MyDB 1 LogTableName LogFileTable And there might be a dozen more configurations for a process