Microsoft announced pricing for Azure. Today, during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 Microsoft announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform including service level agreements and support programs. Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 and Microsoft hopes you will continue building on the Community Technology Preview (CTP) at no cost today. Upon commercial availability Microsoft will offer Windows Azure through a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
I installed Office 2010 last night and already I am liking it a lot after using it for about 30 minutes. There are some time savers in this release that will come in handy. This will be just a short post and I will only cover Excel 2010 and Word 2010. The first new thing I noticed is that you can customize the ribbon now very easy. Another handy thing is that when you hit print, you get the print preview right away.
Vulnerability in Microsoft Office Web Components control could allow remote code execution Another critical problem that is currently being exploited in the wild (0 day attack). Microsoft is investigating a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Office Web Components. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. When using Internet Explorer, code execution is remote and may not require any user intervention.
A recent post in the forum I frequent presented an interesting problem – shrink log file in all user databases. See the reasons why it may not be a good idea explained in Do not truncate your LDF files and Why you want to be restrictive with shrink of database files. The first idea that came to mind was to use sp_MSForEachDB non-documented stored procedure for this task. You can find this article by Arshad Ali very helpful in understanding sp_MsForEachTable and sp_MSForEachDB stored procedures and their parameters.
Well as anyone who has had the luxury of working with Great Plains and its database, you know it’s close to impossible to find data in the database. Well fear not, for there is a way to navigate this labyrinth of a database. The Great Plains developers, as kind as they are, created a tool that allows you to see their documentation on the database and application. If you know the name of the form you want to get data from, you can get it. Here’s how to do it.
Well as anyone who has had the luxury of working with Great Plains and its database, you know it’s close to impossible to find data in the database. Well fear not, for there is a way to navigate this labyrinth of a database. The Great Plains developers, as kind as they are, created a tool that allows you to see their documentation on the database and application. If you know the name of the form you want to get data from, you can get it. Here’s how to do it.
Well as anyone who has had the luxury of working with Great Plains and its database, you know it’s close to impossible to find data in the database. Well fear not, for there is a way to navigate this labyrinth of a database. The Great Plains developers, as kind as they are, created a tool that allows you to see their documentation on the database and application. If you know the name of the form you want to get data from, you can get it. Here’s how to do it.
As a DBA the word no comes out of us often. It’s just the nature of our jobs that we will find ourselves not accepting requests and revoking bad choices already made. If you are a DBA and you’re a yes type of person then you’re in the wrong field. Protecting the company heart and soul in the form of data cannot be successful with the word yes. It’s just not possible.
A few days ago I had a situation in which I needed to get backups for one of my DBs off to the hot site for disaster/recovery purposes. The primary goal was for me to again remove the need to rely on tape backups from my recovery plans. I already have Quests Litespeed in place and with that have the ability to retain a month of backups on a disk array attached to the instance that this DB resides on. That alone has me feeling comfortable but as most DBAs will agree, we never really get into a comfort zone and always feel the need to better protect out data from disasters. So compressed my backups for this DB are running around 15GB and the Differentials are around 6GB. Of course you can’t just log in daily and drag’n’drop these files over the WAN. First the file may not get over there by the time you leave and you end up cancelling it. Second if you have something like RDP or VNC, the chances of the copy failing are 5050 and then the file is useless for restore on the other side. This leads me to my theory of DBAs and the need for them to have basic development skills. I don’t mean for DBAs to run out and become hard core developers. I’m talking about having the ability to go above and beyond the simplistic batch files and windows task manager. In the scenario I was faced with this time, I felt a windows service was idea to get the job done. This way I can use my backup schedules to my advantage and do copy tasks during those off peak hours. Basically my thought process was to grab the file once it was available in the backup directory. Once it was found based on the naming conventions of the files, I then start the copy over to the DR site. This happens through the night and then once the copy succeeds or fails use the event log to capture the events. Now I can simply browse the event viewer on the server the windows service is installed to see how my backups copied over. I can also test my backups by restoring them on that offsite instance either manually or through jobs. Testing your backups by restoring them is of course the best way to know if they will actually save you.
I encountered this question last October in one of the forums I’m frequent. The question was: given the table with the keywords, find all records from some table which would include all these words (Implementing search with AND keyword).