Instead of working, I blog.

I love this. I logged into my Blogger account about 3 weeks ago to post a blog and they had a message up saying that they had a new version with all these new features. I upgraded because it sounded cool, and the first thing they did was mark my blog as spam and disable it.

I filled out the form to get it turned back on and it just came up today. I always pays to upgrade.

From time to time I get saved only by the grace of good practice. I've got this server that has had fairly unreliable backups for a while now. It's really hit or miss as to whether the whole thing will be backed up on any given day. Yesterday was one of those days when the backups failed. It was very tempting to just let it go and have it pick up the backups the next day, but I bit the bullet and did what it took to run the backups by hand instead. What can I tell you... last night, the NOC guy who runs the ETL process messed up and hosed 2 DBs on that server. At 2:30am I got a call that both of those DBs had to be restored. I was able to restore and get things back on track in just a few mins.

Take a page out of my book and never blow off backups. You never know when you'll be called on to restore. Anything can happen at any time and you need to be ready. I know sometimes it's a beating to make sure the troublesome backups complete, but one day it'll really save the day... and maybe your job.

Remember, a DBA is only as good as his last backup.

I just got my copy of Ken Henderson's new book and dispite everything I have to do, I've already started tearing into it. Understand though the he just edited it, he didn't write it. This promises to be every bit as significant as his other books though and it'll be the next book I review. I just pushed it up in the queue (since MSPress is taking so long to send the others I've ordered).

Anyway, once I get it posted, I'll let you guys know.

We recently ran into a very interesting anomoly here upgrading to Yukon. We have the following query.


Select * from DWStsging.dbo.history

Of course, you all know the 3 part naming convention, so you know that DWStsging is the database name. However, what you may not know is that it's misspelled. The real name is DWStaging, and the one in the query is mistyped.

So what makes this interesting? SQL2K runs it just fine, and has for months, while Yukon spits it back at us. It's these little things that upgrading interesting.

These are the kinds of things I really don't mind though. Sure, it's nice that 2K does what you mean, and not necessarily exactly what you say, I'd rather my DB not make assumptions like that. So if anything, Yukon is forcing us to clean up our code where we didn't even know we had problems.

I just ran across this in an SP and I thought I'd share it with you guys...

Select RegionName from Regions
where RegionName IN ('SC', 'MW', 'NE', 'NC', 'NW')


For some reason, I just love the uselessness of this whole thing.