Tuesday, October 25, 2016

A Change of Scenery!

It's been a while since I set finger to keyboard here - naughty me! - but that should change soon - I promise!

After a rather insanely busy first six months of the year - fun but busy - I took a deep breath, strapped all my knowledge about me, jumped ship, and was happy to be rescued by a passing mega-vessel! IOW, I've changed jobs (again), and am now a consultant for no less a company than Microsoft !

No, that doesn't mean that I'm moving to Washington or Oregon, much to the AG's bitter disappointment. Right now it means that during the week I'm to be found on the sunny Costa del Erie, on the beaches at Dearborn, helping out at a well-known purveyor of mobile goods that can be any colour so long as they're black!

Tech Tip for the Episode

If you're getting problems assigning new identities because it takes too long to determine whether you want a new one or just to find the one already in use, then try casting your mind back to Comp Sci 102 and principles of Operating Systems and Mutual Exclusion (mutex). After that horrifying excursion, jump here. You are probably familiar with locking rows or pages of data: these (Application Locks) are simply a lock on a word in memory, so are lots faster. They'll die if you restart SQL Server (of course!) and also when your process (spid) closes, so the memory gets released. They have a name, too, so you can do fun things like naming them according to the data you're trying to lock, thus creating locking without touching the table ...

Have fun!

TTFN

Found Food

I have published quite a few recipes here on my blog over the last few years, and I hope that all my readers have tried at least some of the...