Just A Thought
Bytes and Bites of Internet
TNS Protocol Adapter Error in Oracle
Mar 21st
I like to spend time with Oracle DB just as much time I spend with SQL Server, but we exclusively use SQL Server at our work so I am not getting enough time with Oracle anymore. And another reason is it with Oracle there are way too many variable to consider when you are troubleshooting something. So when couple of days back when I boot up my VM of Oracle, I ran into this strange error and I was genuinely surprised to find how minute the cause could be.
So, this how the story goes …. after booting my VM, I started SQL PLUS utility (it is kind of SQLCMD equivalent of SQL Server, it is CLI to access Oracle DB to be exact). When I was asked to provide login credentials, when I provided ‘em I was greeted with following error message,
ERROR:
ORA-12560: TNS: protocol adapter error
Odd installation of SSDT BI on x64 bit system
Jan 2nd
Visual Studio 2008 full installation had always included Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) with it. But for whatever reasons MSFT decided to skip that part in VS 2010(may be because there was no major release SQL Server during that time) and it was missing for very long time till release of next major SQL Server release aka.. SQL Server 2012. Even at that point there was no BIDS or similar tool set available in VS 2010/12 till MSFT released SQL Server Data Tools BI Studio for VS 2012.
So after I got VS 2013 edition installed on my system I was trying to install SSDT BI for VS 2013 so I can play with it on my new VS. But to my surprise, when I started installation it failed on a step where it check for pre-requisites with error about having different architecture which is understandable since I am using x64 bit system. So I looked for 64bit installation for SSDT BI and found that there is no such installation !!
Weird Snipping tool error
Sep 28th
I rely on great windows utility called Snipping tool both at work and at home to take screenshots of different things to write and keep things in records. And in past I have tried other screenshot replacement tools like Green Shot and Snag It but they are too much for my simple needs to take screenshot. So today when this tool stopped working in my home system, it was my top priority to fix it 
…
There were bunch of solutions explained over different forums including repairing office, killing another running snipping exe, reinstalling tablet pc component etc but none of them worked. One of the suggestion was to do system restore but that will not work for me either (because I have always felt lazy to keep by system backedup to the date 
).
Moving Outlook .PST file
Sep 16th
With SSDs getting cheaper everyday, I finally decided to upgrade myself to newer SSD few months back. SSD gives really nice IOPS pertaining to reads and writes of data but one very major flaw of this technology is it has limited number of read / write life span and you still need tweak your system in certain ways to make sure that your SSD performs well and have big enough lifespan. For example, you disable file Indexing in windows (which never helps anyways)… to avoid constant reads and writes to SSD. One more limitation of SSDs is smaller size (atleast in my case), I got 240 Gb SSD (‘coz don’t want to bet too much on new untested technology 
) … so I have kept all non-essential application installed on my good ol HDD to save space.
Since I have used Outlook for ever, my outlook files are pretty big (>5 Gb X 3 accounts) so they were taking significant space on my SSD plus there was also constant indexing and writing done by process. So I decided to move them to my HDD today.
According to MSDN all I had to do was to move PST file and start Outlook … at which point it will prompt me for location of PST file but after trying number different approaches, Outlook was simply recreating those PST files again and again at same location. So that approach was dud for me. After Ducking (yes, I have officially switched my search engine to DuckDuckGo … but my experience about it in some other posts 
) …
My own RSS synching Server using Tiny Tiny RSS
Mar 22nd
After demise of my favorite RSS Synching Service … Google Reader back in July 2013, I was little lost in quest for ultimate alternative 
since like many IT guys, I don’t stick to just one device and read my feed always from there. Plus me “experimenting” on different things on same system means loosing all of my unbackedup feeds at some unfortunate event of catastrophic system failure … which is just not acceptable for me.
So after little Googling I found out that it’s not just me there are many many people who were upset with Google for discontinuing this great service in the name of “cleaning”. And unlike many upset users who switched to just other local readers… some went a step further and decided to not to be dependent of any other service but to rollout their own solution !! I was able to find two services particularly interesting, one is CommaFeed and another one is Tiny Tiny RSS (aka tt-rss). But former can be pain in back to setup since it requires to checkout project from github and then deploy it on your sever and do whole lot of juggling. But Tiny Tiny RSS (aka tt-rss) is way more simpler solution than that. So I decided to use it to take my revenge to Google Reader . This post is about how did I setup tt-rss on my own server and use it to synch my feeds automatically.
First thing first, you need to find a hosting provider who provides hosting with PHP v. 5.3 or up. There are many providers that do free hosting with required PHP version. I decided to try http://www.freehostingeu.com/ for this demo (no strings attached with this provider 
).
Next is to get latest version of tt-rss from project site. And either extract whole project in your computer and upload everything from your computer OR just upload one TAR file and extract it on site.
Odd Database Project issue with VS 2010
Jan 24th
Recently I stumbled upon really weird issue with VS 2010. We have bunch of database projects created in VS 2010 which are part of our regular development build. As part of my task, I was trying to automate deployment of these database projects using PowerShell and came across really really strange issue that I have never seen before.
I was simply checking out database project from our source control and using MSBUILD (aka MSFT Build Engine) to build and deploy the database project to my test SQL Server instances. Ideally what it does is it allows me to deploy that database at instance that I wish with database name of my selection. But with my surprise when I built and tried to deploy the project I was welcomed with this error …
Monitoring SQL Server using Alerts
Jan 16th
There are many after market tools available to monitor health of SQL Server. But with help of built-in tools you can actually create some pretty neat solution by yourself too. And one of the most handy tool is “Alerts” in SQL Server. With help of Alerts you can monitor SQL Server Events, Various Performance Conditions and oddly WMI events !! And what great thing about it is you can setup it to notify users and / or run specific job (stored in SQL Agent) to handle specific event.
It is very simple to setup Alerts using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Since Alert notification uses Database Mail, you need to have a valid mail profile in order to be able to sent notifications. You can actually use your gmail account for testing. While back I did post about it.
First you need to create an operator which will receive an alerts via Email or Net Send or Pager. You can create new operator in SSMS –> SQL Server Agent –> Operators. Right click on Operators and select “New Operator”.
It has two simple parts, in 1st General part you provide way you want to get notification … be it Email, Net Send Address or Pager. Furthermore you can setup pager schedule. For demo, I will be using my Gmail account as operator email.