This is the fourth article in a multi-article set that describes the basics of Kanban and explores applying Kanban to IT Processes. Part one provides a basic overview of Kanban and how it is used in manufacturing. The remaining parts explore sample scenarios to help generate ideas for your own environment. Several times in the past week I considered rescheduling this article, but despite overtime, a dead car, potential snow and ice, a virus infection on my wife's computer, numerous small devices failing at home and work, and finally a power outage, we have still managed to get it published. Unfortunately the drawings are missing some minor touches, as the power outage happened to coincide with the 'adding of the magnets' in photoshop. In part four of the ‘Applying Kanban’ series, we are following a software development team. They currently follow a process that has been referred to as a sashimi model, a modified waterfall model that incorporates overlapping phases of design, requirements, development, and testing. This example focuses on using Kanban to enhance and refine a current process rather than execute a complete process conversion.

The Script Task The script task is pretty much the all mighty in terms of what you can do. When you sit there initially with the script task in front of you, you are going to be saying you can write your entire process in this thing. I mean in reality you could. You could open a connection to your source database and start hacking your way to the results, the power is there! It has the ability for you to write .NET code in its best form (or worst) and run that task to your SQL Agents heart’s content.

This is the third article in a multi-article set that describes the basics of Kanban and explores applying Kanban to IT Processes. Part one provides a basic overview of Kanban and how it is used in manufacturing. The remaining parts explore sample scenarios to help generate ideas for your own environment. In this, part 3 of the “Applying Kanban to IT Processes” series, we are exploring the use of Kanban to manage a short-term functional project. This example focuses on using Kanban to create a transparent process to track the flow of equipment through a number of complex steps, without incurring additional costs for tracking software, complex processes and training, or duplication of effort. Improved uniformity or quality of the deployment process will also help improve efficiencies in troubleshooting and repair times as well as ensure a document-ably high level of conformance to software and licensing standards.

It really can get bad… Recently I had the pleasure of working on a new database introduced to the environment. This database brought with it the need for some critical reports to be developed in order to properly allow the new business plan to flow. Typically any database and software piece added to the business flow will cause the same two tasks to be deemed critical to the success of the implementation of the system. In these tasks, reporting will force you as either a DBA or DB Developer to become intimate with the database and how it is storing data. During that process of getting to know other database designs and storage engines all together, you will find bad and good practices. In my career I have seen the ugly and then the really ugly but I found on this particular implementation it could get even uglier.

Getting Motivated to make things better… I set out tonight to revamp my SSRS DBA portal and reports. Jason Strate (@StrateSQL) sent me over an index analysis query that he’s been working on and it gave me motivation to get the initial page to my portal redone. If you’re not on Twitter or connected to Jason’s blog, I’d recommend reading and following him. Part of my ‘old’ methods I used in my DBA portal on SSRS had been tied into the SQL Server instances scans I do weekly. If you haven’t read how I set that up, you can here. I still like that scan method and will probably be using it for some time to come. I’ve written many different variations to accomplish the task of scanning the network for instances and that one has always fit into my processes very well so it will be around for some time to come.

The problem for this blog we needed to make some adjustments to the code. One of them was the summary. Because we don’t want our bloggers to write excerpts by themselves, we decided to do it for them (mainly tarwn). To do this we take the original blogpost and cut it off at 600 characters. This works pretty well in php, since there are some functions for this. And this is what we have so far.

If you have multiple queries in one SQL query file, and you are switching around between which ones you want to run at any one time, there is an easy way to do this. The scenario I’m thinking of is something like when you’re solving a SQL puzzle/challenge and keep trying new ideas and query versions. You don’t want to delete your old queries because they are useful for reference or to copy and paste parts of them, but you don’t want to run them all the time. Especially during performance tweaking, you want to be able to quickly comment out the worst queries and keep pasting in new versions of the fastest queries.

Over the last few weeks I have been working on the task of bringing an Oracle database into my SQL Server landscape. The basic process that needs to be accomplished is to get this Oracle database pumped into the existing SQL Server structure primarily to address the reporting aspect and requirements. The software that utilizes the Oracle database could easily sit in their own little world without much need for us to go outside that shell but given my completely SSRS reporting structure, there is a need to build off the new data store for the users taking into account the completely native SQL Server backend.

Hey Folks, Just ran into this minor quirk today, figured I'd share the solution. I have a Webservice that returns an array of a class defined on the server. On the client side, I wanted to extend that class to link it to some GUI elements. Enter the partial class. If you haven't played with Partial Classes before, I'd recommend checking them out. It allows you to build additional functionality into any class. Not by inheriting from a base, but actually extending that class without creating a new one. Anyways, I wound up with the following:

This is the second article in a multi-article set that describes the basics of Kanban and explores applying Kanban to IT Processes. Part one provides a basic overview of Kanban and how it is used in manufacturing. The remaining parts explore sample scenarios to help generate ideas for your own environment. In this, part 2 of the “Applying Kanban to IT Processes” series, we are exploring a generic help desk environment and how Kanban helps them improve their image, measurability, morale, and task reaction and completion times. The example boards and processes in the article are not intended to be drop-in process changes for your business, but instead are designed to walk through a process of creating a Kanban-based system and applying it in a fictional setting. As Kanban is a philosophy and not a fixed set of processes, please remember that this is just one example of how it could be applied in the selected fictional setting.