Author Archives: Clay Lenhart

About Clay Lenhart

I am a DBA/Technical Architect for Latitude Group and love technology.

SQL Server Compressed Backup Bugfix Release

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?

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

I’ve just released version 1.2-20091123 of SQL Server Compressed Backup. SQL Server Compressed Backup will back up a SQL Server database to a compressed file, using either gzip, zip and bzip2. The new features are: Continue reading

Posted in MSSQL Compressed Backup | Tagged , | 129 Comments

How SSAS Cube Processing Affects Running Queries

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

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

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

GWT is Flexible — an iPhone Demo

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 GWT isn’t flexible which will lead developers down a dead-end path and 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

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

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 25 Comments

The “Many Core” Problem

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: 1) Multithreaded code is complex to write and think about. 2)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

There is suddenly a lot of interest in functional languages recently. The two advantages are writing a DSL (Domain Specific Language) and writing concurrent code. The languages that seem to come up are Clojure (JVM), F# (based on OCaml, Haskell, and ML) (.Net CLR), and Erlang (JVM).
Continue reading

Posted in Languages | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

GWT for Web Applications

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , | 1 Comment