Semi-regular web-link clearance – March 2010

Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers

I recently celebrated my 40th birthday.  A friend joked to me, “Hey, guess that means you’re too old to program anymore!”  I laughed on the outside, but it gave me pause.  Age discrimination is nothing to laugh about in our field.  COBOL guys faced this problem years [...]

eTrust AntiVirus, and directories / processes you should exclude from scanning.

Computer Associates used to recommend excluding particular processes and directories from eTrust anti-virus scanning.  This, I found, was very important with Microsoft SQL Server, as it would cause a significant performance hit.

You would do this via setting the following registry keys, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ComputerAssociates\eTrustITM\CurrentVersion\Realtime

szExcludeProcessNames

Reason for exclusion List of processes to be excluded, separated by “|”
Microsoft SQL Server sqlserver.exe  sqlservr.exe
Microsoft Exchange store.exe
Microsoft SMS 2003 SMSEXEC.EXE  CCMEXEC.EXE
and some others …

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Learning T-SQL - Revisited

In my current job, I get to write data extracts. eg. extract data from an SQL database, using Microsoft Access as the front-end. Not my preferred tool, but it’s what I’ve got.

Thought it would be useful to brush up on my T-SQL, so I purchased the book on the right.

Best darn [...]

Should I compress my SQL Database when backing up? - Maybe ...

SQL Server 2008 Backup Compression – by Varun Dhawan, over at MSDN blogs.

It’s a useful option for saving space with backing up to disk, but I would disagree with the guy over tape backup savings.

Some tape units have built-in hardware compression which already compresses the data being stored on tape. Which means there [...]