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The Voice of the DBA

VMs for Development

This editorial was originally published on Feb 14, 2014. It is being republished as Steve is on holiday.

Here's the scenario: you have gotten a few consulting jobs and have a couple clients. This could be your full time employment, or a side job that you perform away from another employer. You want to watch your budget, ensure you can work efficiently, and handle whatever requirements your clients may send your way. This week's question is:

How do you set up your virtual environment at home?

I think the idea of using Virtual Machines (VM) is a given these days, but do you have one VM with all your tools in it? Do you use separate VMs for each client? What about licensing? Those can be complex questions for many people, especially if your employer does not provide you with multiple license keys.

I hope that you are using VMs as having multiple computers isn't practical these days, especially as the cost of power rises. A relatively small, inexpensive desktop computer can run 5, or even 10, VMs to simulate a variety of environments. I've seen some creative uses of hypervisors and other software to simulate clusters, SANs, and even multiple domains on one host.

Let us know this week if you have some good tricks that can help someone get started with virtual machines, building a lab, choosing hardware, or easily configuring networking for their own learning efforts. Tell us what software you use, and if you don't mind sharing cost data, I'm sure others would appreciate the information.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Securing Reporting Services Reports

Mohamed Idttalbe from SQLServerCentral.com

Learn how you can get the userid of someone connected to Reporting Services and use that information to determine if they can view the report. More »
 

New Azure SQL Database Standard Tier Sizes

Additional Articles from SQLPerformance.com

Tim Radney of SQLskills talks about the various Standard tiers available in Azure SQL Database – what they get you, and how much they cost. More »
 

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - More Beginner / Fundamentals Content

Brian Kelley from SQLServerCentral Blogs

Not surprisingly, there are folks who want beginner / fundamentals presentations and blog posts.  I put up the poll based on a... More »
 

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Live on Channel 9 with ReadyRoll

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral Blogs

I was interviewed in Redmond a couple months ago and the video was just published. I show and demo some... More »

Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have a table with a few rows in it. 

 ContactID FirstName 1 Tom 2 Peyton 3 Eli 5 Drew

I have this code. What happens when I run this? 

 DECLARE @name VARCHAR(100) = 'Bob'; SET @name = (SELECT c.FirstName FROM dbo.Contacts AS c WHERE c.FirstName = 'Joe' ) SELECT @name

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have an identity property on the LoggerKey column in my Logger table. I decide to run this 

 SELECT IDENT_CURRENT('Logger')

What is returned?

Answer: The last identity value used in an insert for the Logger table in any session and any scope

Explanation:

The IDENT_CURRENT() function will return the last identity value generated for the specific table in any session and any scope.

Ref: IDENT_CURRENT - click here

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

Trigger Based Change Data capture

Ankush Parab from SQLServerCentral.com

Description:

SQL Server has in-built methods to capture changes occurring to tables. Eg. Change data Capture, Change tracking and auditing. However, they have some shortcomings. Such as, CDC does not provide "user" who made the change or Change tracking does not provide before and after image of data, etc.

This trigger based solution provides simple way to capture changes occuring to table and its designed t ocapture changes from all tables to single log table. The change data is logged in JSON format.

Sample json payload for reference:-

Snapshot of Changelog table:-

How to use:

The script can be used to create triggers on mulitple tables by providing comma seperated list which need to be setup in "configuration" section of the script along with schema name. The script has to be run against intended database.

More »

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