SQL Server Compressed Backup Bugfix Release

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Clay Lenhart

Bugfix 1.2-20110729 increases a timeout when estimating the size of a differential backup. Previous releases could fail with a timeout error if the database was large.

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

WebSockets is cool, but what can you do today?

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Clay Lenhart

WebSockets is a new feature that appears to be a great way to send messages from the server to the browser, however today there isn’t much support, both in browsers and on the server in IIS and ASP.Net.

Today you can use a Comet technique (in particular, Ajax with long polling) which is available in all browsers. Using this concept, the browser makes a standard AJAX call to the server that waits until it receives a message. Asynchronous Pages and Asynchronous Controller allow you to have long running HTTP requests without using precious ASP.Net threads.
Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.Net | Tagged , , , , , | 97 Comments

SQL Server Compressed Backup v1.2 Released

Posted on November 23, 2009 by Clay Lenhart

I’ve just released version 1.2-20091123 of SQL Server Compressed Backup which can be downloaded here.

SQL Server Compressed Backup will back up SQL Server databases using either gzip, zip or bzip2 compression.

The new features are:
Continue reading →

Posted in MSSQL Compressed Backup | Tagged , | 129 Comments

How SSAS Cube Processing Affects Running Queries

Posted on May 29, 2009 by Clay Lenhart

SSAS cube processing can kill running queries. That’s right, it may kill queries in order to commit changes to the cube.

Here is what happens during SSAS cube processing. Continue reading →

Posted in SSAS | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Execution Plan of Frequent Queries

Posted on May 29, 2009 by Clay Lenhart

Bill Galashan, DBA of bet365 sent over the following query that lists the execution plan of the 10 most frequently executed queries.

He writes:

We got into this due to different query plans coming from a VB or a web app than what was seen when running the same query from Management Studio. Eventually tracked this down to a difference in the set options predominatley whether Arithabort was on or off.

Read more to see his query. Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Server Administration | Tagged , , , , , | 28 Comments

GWT is Flexible — an iPhone Demo

Posted on May 25, 2009 by Clay Lenhart

GWT is a very flexible environment that allows you to write a web application in Java and compile it to Javascript — even for the iPhone.

A number of people have fears with GWT, for instance

  • (not true) GWT isn’t flexible which will lead developers down a dead-end path.
  • (not true) GWT is ugly, and can’t be used to make “gucci” UIs.

This post will show that these are just myths. Continue reading →

Posted in Languages | Tagged , , | 44 Comments

OpenID is great

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Clay Lenhart

It’s so easy to set up, I can’t believe I haven’t done it before.
Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 25 Comments

The “Many Core” Problem

Posted on October 25, 2008 by Clay Lenhart

We, as developers, have a problem.  CPUs will continue to have more cores, and each core is not going to be any faster.  The only way to write faster applications is to write multithreaded code, which has two challenges:

  • Multithreaded code is complex to write and think about.
  • Multithreaded code is difficult to test.

From what I’ve seen, people are pursuing 4 approaches.  Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Languages | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

Functional Language Explosion

Posted on October 18, 2008 by Clay Lenhart

There is suddenly a lot of interest in functional languages recently.  The two advantages are

  • Writing a DSL (Domain Specific Language)
  • Writing concurrent code

The languages that seem to come up are:

  • Clojure (JVM)
  • F# (based on OCaml, Haskell, and ML) (.Net CLR)
  • Erlang (JVM)

I’m not particularly interested in DSL (despite my last post on code generators), however as CPUs contain more and more cores, we’ll need a way to safely write multithreaded code.

The Clojure project has an interesting post on its approach on simplifying multithreaded code.

Erlang handles concurrency by only having local variables and providing a way to send messages to and from other threads.

Lastly, MPI is a .Net library for distributed processing where the same program executes multiple times and each instance communicates with each other using message passing which sounds very Erlang-like.

Posted in Languages | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

GWT for Web Applications

Posted on October 18, 2008 by Clay Lenhart

There are several approaches for writing web applications, each with their own advantages.  GWT is a new framework with its own niche.

  • Your standard ASP.Net (or JSP/PHP/etc) w/ Ajax and JQuery (or other Javascript library)
  • Java WebStart or .Net ClickOnce
  • GWT w/ Webservices

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , | 1 Comment