10. April 2008 by Bennett.

It’s been a while since I worked on my cluster lab. The first thing that I did was to tear down the old cluster and start over from scratch. The first lesson from this round of testing came when the cluster administrator scanned the hardware resoruces and threw a warning message that stated that only one adapter was found on the node. This warning is caused by fact that the two cluster nodes are interconnected via a crossover cable and the second node is shut down. With the node shut down, there is no physical layer link on the Ethernet card, so the OS thinks that the cable is disconnected.

I got past the error by simply plugging the cluster member’s private network connection into a spare switch that I had lying around. This provided a physical layer link which was what the OS needed to report a valid network connection. After that I rescanned the resources and the cluster installation proceeded.

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7. April 2008 by admin.

Here is another handy date manipulation function. This one converts the number of seconds, expressed as an int, into the HH:MM:SSS format

SELECT
CASE
WHEN @seconds/3600<10 THEN '0'
ELSE ”
END
+ RTRIM(@seconds/3600)
+ ':' + RIGHT('0'+RTRIM((@seconds % 3600) / 60),2)
+ ':' + RIGHT('0'+RTRIM((@seconds % 3600) % 60),2)

Rewritten as a function, we have:

CREATE FUNCTION SecToHHMMSS
(
– Add the parameters for the function here
@seconds INT
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(10)
AS
BEGIN
RETURN
CASE
WHEN @seconds/3600<10 THEN '0'
ELSE ”
END
+ RTRIM(@seconds/3600)
+ ‘:’ + RIGHT(‘0′+RTRIM((@seconds % 3600) / 60),2)
+ ‘:’ + RIGHT(‘0′+RTRIM((@seconds % 3600) % 60),2)
END
GO


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7. April 2008 by Bennett.

Here is a very simple and elegant way to strip the time component from a datetime value:

CAST(FLOOR(CAST(@date AS float)) AS datetime)

Written as a function:

CREATE FUNCTION BareDate
(
– Add the parameters for the function here
@date datetime
)
RETURNS datetime
AS
BEGIN
RETURN CAST(FLOOR(CAST(@date AS float)) AS datetime)
END
GO

When we pass in the value ‘2008-02-12 13:25:33.3′, it returns the value 2008-02-12 00:00:00.000

Other ways of stripping the time component:

SELECT DATEADD(dd,(DATEDIFF(dd,0,backup_start_date)),0)

or:

SELECT CAST(DATEDIFF(dd,0,backup_start_date) AS Datetime)Using the convert has performance issues.  I’ll have to come up with numbers for all these: or

SELECT CONVERT(Datetime, CONVERT(NCHAR(10), backup_start_date, 121))

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3. April 2008 by admin.

Yahoo 360 is a lame duck, so I’m moving my postings over to this web site.

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3. April 2008 by Bennett.

Today I was reminded of something that I knew but forgot. The IIS Metabase Explorer for IIS6 (or MetaEdit for IIS 4 and 5) is a very useful tool. I needed to blow away an inheritable attribute of the HttpRedirect property. The Metabase explorer made the task ridiculously simple.

The Metabase Explorer is part of the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit.

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1. April 2008 by Bennett.

Here is an interesting Microsoft Knowledgebase article titled Disk performance may be slower than expected when you use multiple disks in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Windows 2000.

It explains how a partition misalignment can cause significant I/O by causing reads and writes to straddle track boundaries. The fix is to use the diskpart.exe utility to create an alignment offset when you first create the partition.

This is similar to what you do with SAN storage to align the starting offset to “significant” boundaries. See the 3/31/08 post for more details.

Posted in Performance, SQL Server | Print | 1 Comment »