SQL Server 2005 has a great dynamic management view named sys.dm_io_cluster_shared_drives . If you have clustering and want to know what
shared disk/s which is/are used by clustered SQL Server instance run the following query.
SELECT DriveName
FROM sys.dm_io_cluster_shared_drives
ORDER BY DriveName
Right now, I have my own server running in the Amazon data center. Getting such an Amazon server running has really become very easy. With Elasticfox, a plug in for Firefox, everything can be configured in a trivial and user friendly way. No more need to use command line tools or write your web service calls yourself. Just follow the Getting Starting Guide.
During vacation, I read the book “Programming Amazon Web Services” by James Murty. Great book, with lots of Ruby code to invoke all the low level web services. The book was published in February 2008 and already a bit outdated during summer when I read it, but getting more and more behind. Amazon is implementing new features at such a rapid pace:
So now I have my own simple Windows 2003 server with a fixed IP address and DNS name. Accessing the server goes fine with Remote Desktop. The responsiveness is not always top, but similar to a local VMWare instance. By the way, this is a perfect alternative for VMWare and a serious! I have the smallest server instance (AMI) running, which is obviously virtualised at Amazon. But it looks like dual-core Opteron with 1.66 GB of memory. And bandwidth is phenomenal: downloading Acrobat at more than 8 MByte/s.
Amazon is already announcing future features such as load balancing, monitoring and automatic scaling (automatically launching extra server instances). Strange that charging is still done via credit card. But I assume that big users can get a real invoice with payment terms.
On Friday Dec. 12, the Amazon evangelist Simone Brunozzi will give a talk at Devoxx conference.
Tags: amazon web, API, blog, Computer, Computing, database, desktop, ip address, linux, memory, oracle, rms, ruby, Server, server instance, sla, SQL, system, tools, vmware, web, Web Services, WindowsWhat’s happening if you installed SQL Server instance with a collation that is different from a database collation? We just started testing our production application and everything seem to work well, however one of our stored procedure inserts hebrew characters into temporary table and then after some operations the data get insertded into a real table. Guess what wee have seen in the database? Right,we have seen ‘????’ symbols. Sure, if you do not use temporary table and insert the data directly into a permanent table you will see the right characters. Someone said that we should decline of using temporary table and insert the data into ‘temporary’ permanent table. Another guy said that we should run ALTER DATABASE tempdb command to change COLLATION, but as we know you cannot run this statement on system databases.
The error is
Msg 3708, Level 16, State 5, Line 1
Cannot alter the database ‘tempdb’ because it is a system database.
So what is the solution? Well , use the REBUILDDATABASE option in Setup.exe or re-install the instance. Fortunately, the whole story happened on developing machine and we did not forget to install PRODUCTION server with right collation:-).
Just wanted to note you how important is to choose the ‘right’ collation while installing production server.
Tags: application, database, database collation, Databases, production server, Server, server instance, SQL, system, system database, system databases
