Anyone else on DNJ feeling the pain of comment spam? Maybe I'll take some freerolls or tramadyne or applesauce :-) Anonymous comments are turned off for now. Use the contact form instead, please. And can someone at the top fix this? Tags: comment spam, DotNetJunkies

What does the "Category" drop-down for SQL Server Agent jobs do? The options are so limited and make no sense to me: "Full-Text"? "REPL-Alert Response"? "Web Assistant"? If, like me, you've ever asked yourself the above question, wonder no more. Tim Ford has an article on MSSQLTips.com titled "Custom job categories to organize your SQL Agent jobs" which answers this, and more. Tim's article is so useful and simple that immediately after reading it, I went out and added a couple of custom categories, and then assigned my "[Uncategorized (Local)]" jobs. All this took less than 10 minutes, and now I know...

We've got a boiling water unit in the tea room that I pass by every day, that is over-engineered. I feel a short rant coming on... This boiling water unit's primary function is to deliver boiling water, so people can make their instant coffee or tea. It does this well - there's a big black button that, when pushed, runs boiling water from a nozzle directly underneath the button. So far, so good. If the boiling water unit was limited to this functionality, it could be regarded as a success. However, it also has: an screen with the time and day of the...

Recently, my boss paid for me to attend Microsoft Course 2780 Maintaining a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database at Solid Quality Learning (thanks, boss!) Around 18 months ago, our department was put in charge of a SQL Server 2005 box. I've been using SQL 2005 since then which of course gave me a huge headstart in the course. Way back when, I attended the 2779 training (focused more on developers), and thought that the 2780 training would complement it and make me into a DBA :-) Well, the training is over, and I'm not a DBA, but I got a lot out of the...

...the updater is more invasive than the waft of a poopy nappy in a small room :-) However, remembering to update software is not my strong point. gHacks put me on to a small program called JavaRa that checks for Java updates and removes old versions. And doesn't require an install. Very handy. Time to go change that nappy! Tags: java, updater, javara, ghacks

 Bloglines was my RSS reader of choice for almost 4 years. I loved using it because it was web-based, easy to use, fast, dependable, full-featured (in 2004), and free. Unfortunately Bloglines was ignored for a couple of years by the developers, during which time I stuck with it doggedly anyway. It got slightly less dependable (i.e. the notorious "Bloglines plumber"), and other readers overtook it in terms of functionality. Surprisingly, it was the new beta version which eventually drove me away - it was a case of too little, too late - and worryingly, the beta initially didn't work properly for...

I'm very fortunate to be at SQL Server 2005 training in Melbourne all week this week. Our instructor is Aussie SQL Server MVP Rob Farley who blogs at msmvps.com/blogs/robfarley/ and is unbelievably knowledgeable about the product (of course).So far I've collected 2 useful code snippets from Rob - more on useful stuff from the course later:--show all plans in the cache, courtesy Rob Farley--adding "OPTION (RECOMPILE)" means that subsequent executions --of this query aren't added to the cacheSELECT  * FROM    sys.dm_exec_cached_plans p CROSS APPLY         sys.dm_exec_sql_text(p.plan_handle) t CROSS APPLY         sys.dm_exec_query_plan(p.plan_handle) q OPTION (RECOMPILE) --comma-separated from resultset in 1 call,...