25Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

AdventureWorks2012 Bug on Azure

Azure
While I have production databases in Azure, I can't exactly experiment with them at will. Further, while they mostly have pretty innocuous data, it's not all public. So, I need a mechanism for creating a database that I can play with in Azure. I use AdventureWorks. I get it. It's not that big (actually a good thing for Azure) and it's not a great database design which doesn't reflect reality (I would argue makes this reflects reality as I've seen it). However, it's a handy resource because you can go to Codeplex and download it. That makes it a great way to teach others because everyone has access to it. But... The other day I download the database and install it on my Azure system. I wanted cleaned up copies…
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26Apr 2012 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

AlwaysOn Failover Bug

Uncategorized
I just found a little bug in AlwaysOn. It’s actually not that big a deal, but it’s interesting. In a nutshell, if you have a table with an IDENTITY seed less than 1000, when you do a failover the table is reseeded to 1001. The steps to reproduce are posted on this Connect item. If you have feedback on this, please post it directly to the Connect item since I don’t think Microsoft reads my blog much.
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16Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Powershell SMO Problem

PowerShell
We've been running the Enterprise Policy Management tools available from Codeplex for a few months now (Thanks to Buck Woody's (blog | twitter) session at the PASS Summit). They're honestly great. It's a fantastic way to use Policy Based Management on 2000 and 2005 servers. We did hit some issues with timeouts and looking at the script, it made a call to invoke-sqlcmd, but didn't pass the -querytimeout value. That means it default to 30 seconds and the import to database process was taking more than a minute for some of our queries. I did a little looking around and decided to just disable the timeout by passing a value of zero (0). But, I still got timeouts. Finally, after a bit of searching around, I found a closed (because…
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13Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Operations Manager Feedback

Tools
If you're involved with maintaining Microsoft Operations Manager, you probably have a few things you'd like to tell the developers, such as, couldn't you get some sort of override manager/explorer built into the system? Well, they've built a new feedback mechanism through the updated Connect interface. Get on over there and make your voice heard. Yeah, I wasn't really tracking it either until I saw this post from the OM development team's blog.
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17Apr 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Pushing Connect

PASS
I have posted multiple times that I think Microsoft Connect is one of the best tools you can use to communicate with Microsoft. It works. Buck Woody is reinforcing my position from the Microsoft side of the fence. Look, Microsoft is not a small nimble company like Red Gate. And again, unlike Red Gate, you might not find yourself in a conversation with the CEO of Microsoft on the floor of a conference like the PASS Summit. And short of going to PASS or TechEd to track down some of the developers and project managers (many of whom attend these conferences), you need to have a mechanism to communicate with the company. You can try standing on your front door step and screaming (trust me, the neighbors just call the police)…
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27Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Connect Works

Uncategorized
Microsoft Connect works. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but it really does work. You will get the attention of MS developers and they will respond. It's not always fast, but it gets there. Of course, I was trying to create samples for the book, which came out almost two weeks ago, so this is a bit late for me personally... HA! But it really does work.
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