Hands off the database

Being a SQL dev I generally poo poo most ORM tools, I want control over what SQL Server does – you know, I can squeeze so much more performance out of the queries than any mapping tool can.

However, there comes a time when maybe you just want to select some data and do that as easily as possible – most small to medium sized sites probably require basic querying and really dont need some whizzy dba to get the last drop of performance out of the db.

I have been very impressed lately by Subsonic, in particular Subsonic 3 as it introduces the best hands-off approach to databases out of all the ORM tools out there. In version 3 of this mighty tool , it comes with something called the SimpleRepository . What this does is really take away the need to worry about the database. You simply create a class to represent your object (table) and when you select, insert with that object it creates (migrations) the database objects if they are not there. It also handles changes, performaing an ALTER on the fly.

For more information on this , please visit http://subsonicproject.com

Pencil Mocks

I really like this free Firefox addon for designing screen mocks, its called Pencil and can be download/install using the Firefox addons menu or from here:

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/

Dynamic styling for Reports

This is a great article on adding dynamic styling to reports, if I dont say so myself.

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-tools/reporting-services-with-style/

Picture View of Views

Everyone loves a picture , right? Well, this is the updated map of views for SQL 2008.

Enjoy.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=531c53e7-8a2a-4375-8f2f-5d799aa67b5c&displaylang=en

Cushy CMS

Recently, I have had to update a really old website I did for a client  , it was based on ASP (classic!) but essentially was static pages of content. What I really wanted was a way for them to update the site easily themselves but I didn’t want to spend time re-writing it as this was a freebie.

So, I thought to myself – there must be a free CMS out there that didn’t need a db and just allowed you to change the content with minimal setup.. well, it look a little bit of google magic but I found one.

This is really neat for anyone who has the need to allow updates to any website (even if parts of it are dynamic).

The CMS is called Cushy CMS (www.cushycms.com). It basically gives you the ability to “allow” specific content to be updated by decorating your pages with a special class name.

It works like this. You make a change to any DIV or any tag that allows a class to be specified and add a “cushycms” class name. Then, you login to your cushycms account and add the site details (ftp) and assign pages. Any page you assign that has the special class names on them will be editable.

Simple.

There is one alternative I found after which I think works exactly the same way, its called SurrealCMS (www.surrealcms.com).

Worth checking it out.

Krypton Suite 3 Released!

For those into these kind of things, the excellent Kryoton Suite has reached the grand old age of 3 – its a superb control suite for use in Windows Applications and allows you to create the most eye catching software. It is also very reasonable for us developers on a budget .

http://www.componentfactory.com/

Google Chrome Guide

I found this superb guide to google chrome, loads of shortcuts and hidden gems to play around with.

http://lifehacker.com/5045904/the-power-users-guide-to-google-chrome

SSIS Expressions

Anyone else find expressions in SSIS really not that easy to find information on? well, MSDN for a change comes to the rescue…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141232.aspx

SQL Server 2008 Full Text slowness

I was lucky enough to visit Microsoft during the CTP period and was testing out integrated full text search in 2008. An issue we experienced was that full text can be slow when there is a high number of updates to the index and is caused by blocking on the docidfilter internal table. 

It appears to happen if:

• You have AUTO tracking on your full text indexes; although we changed it to manual and still had this issue.
• You experience Full-text queries taking a long time to execute; normally when updates are happening at the same time so you might only see this in production.
• One or more of your queries are complicated or take some time to complete.

You can check to see if your system is slow due to this by:

• SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats statement , it shows very high wait times some of the locks.
• Running Sp_who2; it should consistently show that the full-text gather is blocking full-text queries and, in turn, is being blocked by the queries.

The current work around for this issue is to use a global trace flag microsoft kindly enabled on the RTM build.  To use this, type the following Transact-SQL statement:

DBCC TRACEON (7646, -1)

This has a minor side-effect.. which may or may not be important in your organisation. Certainly in ours, it is not. Your full text result may be ever so slightly out of date – e.g. you might return or not return a particular document from the index. However, this issue relates to the dirtyness of an index in terms of 10’s of milliseconds. Important? Unlikely….

I believe there is a knowledge base article on this.

SQL 2008 Training Material

Some great 2008 material here:

http://sqlserver2008jumpstart.microsofttraining.com/content/info.asp?CcpSubsiteID=69&infoid=27