Notes from the March 2017 MagicPASS Meeting

I was a last minute volunteer to speak at the March meeting and used it as a chance to talk about Devops for the DBA as a practice run for my session at the upcoming Orlando Code Camp. One of the nice things about having been to the group as a speaker a few times […]

Applying SQL Service Pack on Encrypted Drives

I have a server that uses a third party disk encryption product. It’s configured so that the SQL service account and sysadmins have the ability to encrypt/decrypt files. The local system account does not, nor does the local admins group. Good for security, but it causes some pain when you run a service pack. Service packs […]

SSMS – Not a Valid Value for Property Width

I’ve had this happen a couple of times with a recent build of SSMS. Something went wrong – resolution change maybe – and it wouldn’t load, error “is not a valid value for property ‘Width’”. I finally tracked it down to this registry key. Editing or deleting fixed the problem.

Orlando Code Camp 2017

I’ll be attending and speaking at Orlando Code Camp on April 8th. Come by and say hello if you’re attending, maybe we can talk career paths, security, or devops for dbas!

Reading the January 2017 PASS Minutes

I’ve been catching up on stuff this week, including reading the January 2017 minutes. It was in-person meeting so a lot was covered. I don’t want to summarize it, you should read it, but there were some trends I noticed I wanted to comment on: Goals are frequently mentioned, but not shown. What was the […]

Reviewing the PASS 2017 Budget

I did a quick review of the 2017 PASS Budget. It’s not a page turner, but it has a lot of good information. I wish there as more context about some of the changes. The following isn’t a summary, just notes about areas I either care about or caught my eye: No revenue growth predicted […]

A Note on Configuring HP SSD’s

Sharing this without a supporting link, might help someone. During a recent move from SAN to local SSD the storage guy noted that the following has to be done to get best performance. This command disables SSD Smart Path. You must disable the SSD Smart Path before enabling Controller caching. /opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl slot=3 array c […]

Configuring KDIFF With Git

Posting this mostly in case I need it again. I needed a merge tool for Git, Kdiff is free and useful, but you have to get all the switches set up if you want full functionality (three way merge). I found the answer on this blog post (a reminder to us all to share stuff we […]

The PASS Executive Committee

I was just reading The PASS Board Guidance Policy . Overall a reasonable document and absolutely worth reading if you’re thinking about running for the Board. It is missing what I consider a key point about the Executive Committee, so I wanted to write a quick note on that. The Executive Committee (ExecCo in PASS lingo) are […]

Thinking about Chapters (aka Groups)

I think it was 2003 or 2004 when someone from PASS came to Orlando and helped start what became OPASS. They stressed the need to find speakers each month and the need to have multiple people involved so that the group wouldn’t die if someone moved on. The formula was find a sponsor, find a […]

SQLAndy

Month: March 2017