Category Archives: Uncategorized

Coming Home

Posted by mysticstache on

Almost 2 months ago I had my first day at Avanade. For those of you who don’t know, Avanade was cerated as a join venture between Microsoft and Accenture. Avanade has thier own business development streams but 99.9% of the Microsoft projects Accenture wins, are sent to the the Avanade team for execution.

Well let me just say what an absolute joy it has been to come back to the Microsoft family of products. After 13 months of wasting my life away fighting with Open Source garbage, I’ve come home to integrated enterprise solutions that work as advertised or at least have some reliable sources for support when they don’t. I was actually told to stop blogging about how much the Open Stack is a waste of time and money… Anyway, that’s behind me.

To add to the good vibes, Avanade is connected to Microsft in so many ways. We’ve actually had advanced looks at new technologies before the rest of the community. There 20+ MVPs in just the Midwest region, Avanade requires 80+ hours of training every year, and employees are encouraged to participate in developer community organizations.

I’m excited to talk about the first area of expertise they’d like me to look at, Avanade Touch Analytics (ATA). I haven’t completed the training yet, but this offering is fantastic. The easiest interface I’ve ever used to create dashboards that look and feel like Tableau or Spotfire, but perform lightyears ahead of both. Once the data sources are made available to the ATA server for any customer’s instance, the dashboards can be authored for or on any device. Switch between layout views to see how your dashboards will look on any device before releasing them. Publish multiple dashboards to different Active Directory security groups and let your users pick the information that’s important to them. It’s exciting, and I’m glad to see an offering addressing the shortcomings of the competition in a hosted or onsite instalations.

Well that’s enough advertising. Now that my censorship is at an end, I’ll be blogging mroe often I really want to discuss SQL Server’s memory resident database product, interesting things I’ve learned about the SSIS Service recently, and Service Broker.

Sometimes You Gotta Clean That Thing

Posted by mysticstache on

For my first professional job out of college I tried to scrape together any sort of experience I could put on my resume. I was applying for any sort of IT department that would have me. One of the things on my cover letter was designing and following a hardware maintenance plan that included vacuuming out the dust in my personal computer case. I think back about how ridiculous that was at the time.

Just a couple weeks ago the desktop I had my other residence near Chicago, in the vicinity of the industry and steel mills that make up North West Indiana, was blue screening frequently. When I pulled it out and set it on the table you could look through the Plexiglas side door and see every surface covered in fuzzy dust.

I brought the dirty thing back to Fort Wayne and opened it up. It was worse than I ever imagined. I filled up the tank on my little Dyson rechargeable vac. And that wasn’t even the real trouble spot. The dust had gotten so caked up behind the CPU fan that it was blocking the air flow through the heat sinks. The situation was so bad the dust had actually baked into the heat dissipating fins to the point tat it was brittle and had to be chiseled and blown out with compressed air rather than just vacuumed.

Now that I’m older I get to delegate some things, and I think it”s time my son started working on his technical experience.

SQL SERVER – All Table & its Index sizes in MBs

Posted by mysticstache on

SQL Server Portal

Today, I received a query enquiring how to calculate the table Size, its index size along with the total number of rows, as the client’s database file size suddenly grew from MBs to GBs and they wanted to know what was inserted in which tables that caused this instant growth.

So, I started searching for solution over the web, but most of the solutions use cursor to calculate each table & its index size along with the total number of rows. I could not get what I was looking for, so, I thought of writing this and calculate it with an optimized query and convert the table & its index size to MBs instead of KBs because windows keep the file sizes in MBs also.

Given below is the Script :

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Thanksgiving

Posted by mysticstache on

As you sit down to enjoy your Thanksgiving meal today, please take a moment to consider those men and woman who made the difficult decision to sacrifice family time and the comforts of home in the service of others. Some may be standing in the chow line in a distant country protecting our freedom, some may be opening an MRE while protecting his or her brothers and sisters in the chow hall or mess tent. I’m thankful for the food I’ll enjoy, the time with my family this holiday, and those working so hard to keep us safe.

Welcome to Wisdom From the Stache

Posted by mysticstache on

I have over 15 years of software and database design/development experience relating to many divergent industries. I’ve been a party to, or a witness of, nearly every variation of the wrong way of producing technical solutions. On occasion, I’ve experienced the unparalleled joy of the right way. This blog will explore the truths, falsehoods, fallacies, pitfalls, misconceptions and best practices I’ve acquired in my journeys. I hope you gain some benefit from them.