svekweb.co.uk

This one’s a nightmare and the only reason I’ve still got sql 2000 on any of my machines. They are having issues with the merge going wrong and the old content instead of the newer content being replicated.

Currently trying custom replication for them – although I think I would personally prefer to use a custom stored procedure instead of the standard SQL merge replication com objects!

Back working in Edinburgh for an internet company for another 3 months – working on their database which is SQL 2005 and uses replication heavily – 6 web servers to contend with (at the moment).

Interesting especially having spent the last 6 months effectively working on batch to be faced with the challenge of <.2 seconds response time for all the queries - although there are quite a few batch processes to deal with as well which don't have quite as strict a response time. Just as well when some of the feeds are > 6Gb!

Although having loaded a backlog of 300 events, by the time the development was finished – most of them are in the expired category (automatically expire based on the date of the event!).

Quite suprised by the regional takeup of the feature for wedding fayre organisers to add their own details – some parts of the country seem to love it – others are just not interested at all.

– recommended reading if you want to use CSS on your site quickly, although I don’t think it’s 10 minutes promise is a bit optimistic – depending on what you want to do. Particularly like the section on applying corners via css style sheets!

The site is All Wedding Fayres which allows event organisers to add their own events to the site – with a review of all additions – you know what it’s like – you allow comments or guestbooks and lo and behold they get filled with links for dubious products and websites.

Just wondering if they come under this category, I didn’t even know they existed until a few weeks ago – obviously they are trying to expand, but I’m getting fed up of them unsolicited emails from them every time they open a new site up – I’m Welsh and they’ve created a few domains to cover Wales lately – When they first started – I even stupidly clicked on their opt-out site – so now they know that that email address is valid – I seem to be getting a couple of emails for every new site they launch.
They use constantcontact.com as a “mailing” service and you would have to then opt out of every single account they send it under since every campaign is technically for a different website it appears.
So I’ve sent the old can the spam message to abuse@myjobgroup.com since it doesn’t seem much point to send one to each contact individually and I’ve asked them to remove my details from any and all mailing lists associated with their company

Interestingly they are actually spamming a work email address with invitations to go and get a new job – in my case since it’s my own company that’s not too bad – but if they are using general mailing lists then are they going to affect some peoples careers since totally out of the blue – there is an email in your corporate mailbox – which is monitored looking as if you are looking for new jobs!

I know that I publish my contact details on job boards – but they are on job boards under my control and I target the audience who can see my details.

Ho Hum – rant of the day over. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they actually had any jobs that were interesting on their site in the first place.

Been looking at a simple way of integrating an RSS feed into a site – see it at Where In Llanelli Web Site – whereinllanelli.co.uk integrated into PHP page instead of using java script based rss feed.
It uses magpie rss and does an array sort on the rss results to order them in descending date order. Other interesting technique used here is array slice to limit the result set and magpie rss feed also caches the results to avoid overloading the server that sources the feed.
Waiting now for the customer to make it live since it’s currently using an html version of the page with a javascript feed for some news and a static snapshot of the rest of the news.
Longer term looking to add some more PHP scripts for the customer – to keep some of the other areas of the site updated more efficiently.

There are serious performance issues with loading data into very wide columns. The client I’m doing some consultancy for has a generic load routine which loads text files into nvarchar max columns and then does data type checking.
The rational behind this is that they can report any records with invalid data type mappings. However, reducing the width of the fields has a significant impact on the performance.

As an example – input record with 132 columns – reduce the size down to twice the expected size of each field gives a five fold improvement in the load procedure. Significant when you are dealing with 30Gb files!

My recommdation to them was to do stricter data typing allthough i couldn’t convince them to do the ultimate and just use an SSIS error record to mark any invalid records.

It doesn’t work on VMWare 64 bit servers if they are installed on 32 bit hardware, a bit unusual combination but suprisingly hard to diagnose the problems.

Hints include total inability to load SSMS and any other sql product e.g. profiler. Since the solution uses dynamic SQL throughout this is a bit of a hindrance!