MSSQL partitioning and sp_whoisactive

Partitioned Tables and Indexes in SQL Server 2005

Partitioned Table and Index Strategies Using SQL Server 2008

Who is Active

MSSQL does not support remote scale-valued user define function call.

MSSQL 2008 added new functions merge().

Zip file in windows script

'
' http://superuser.com/questions/110991/can-you-zip-a-file-from-command-prompt
' http://www.rondebruin.nl/windowsxpzip.htm
' http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb787866%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
'
Dim objArgs, InputFolder, ZipFile, objShell, source, ct

Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments 
InputFolder = objArgs(0) 
ZipFile = objArgs(1) 
CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").CreateTextFile(ZipFile, True).Write "PK" & Chr(5) & Chr(6) & String(18, vbNullChar) 
Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") 
Set source = objShell.NameSpace(InputFolder).Items 

' 4 - Do not display a progress dialog box.
objShell.NameSpace(ZipFile).CopyHere source, 4 

'Keep script waiting until Compressing is done
ct = 0
Do Until objShell.Namespace(ZipFile).items.Count = objShell.NameSpace(InputFolder).items.count
   WScript.sleep 1000
   ct = ct + 1
Loop

WScript.Echo "Zip used " & ct & " seconds."

Set source = nothing
Set objShell = nothing
WScript.Quit(0)

Some recent progresses in astronomy and physics

All happen in September and October:

- European experiment reveals the possibility of neutrinos running faster than light. See paper and Youtube video.

- 3 physicists won Nobel Prize for research in the accelerating expansion of the university.

- European Space Agency (ESA) selected the close Solar Orbitor Probe (expected 2017) and Euclid Space mission (expected 2019) projects, to investigate into the sun and the dark matters. See Europeans Planning Closest Solar Probe Ever and Euclid Space Mission Selected by ESA.

File system size limit

There is a limit on how many files or folders you can have in a file system. When that limit is reached the program will bomb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/466521/how-many-files-in-a-directory-is-too-many

Trends of technology

It would be of interests to watch the trend of technologies. Below are some websites:

http://trends.builtwith.com/ - show deployment technology of websites.
http://news.netcraft.com/ - show deployment technology of websites.
http://www.google.com/trends/ - show search trends
http://www.tiobe.com/ - for programming languages
http://langpop.com/ - for programming languages. (This site is for sale as of November, 2011)

RoR

RoR is yet another framework for web development. Its major principles are: DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), CoC (Convention over Configuration) and MVC design pattern.

Ruby was design by Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto since mid-1990s. RoR started to become hot back in 2006 due to the release of rails (initial release in 2004) by a Finnish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson. It peaked around end of 2008, since then it is declining (see tiobe index report).

Frankly I don't like RoR very much. It gives you a complete/complicated infrastructure from the very beginning, sure. But following development is restricted to this framework. Building the development environment involves Ruby, Rails is a confusing process, especially when you need to incorporate postgreSQL, Git, Github and Heroku. It's an entire self-contained platform. It adds another layer of abstraction, for example, with the use of HAML and SASS.

RoR Tutorial Book
Starting a Rails app with HAML, Rspec, Devise and Web app theme

Personally, I would prefer PHP, or Python. PHP has a huge body of code repository. Setting up development environment for PHP is much easier.

Twitter has been using RoR, but when scaling the size the site became unstable. Twitter thus updated part of its server end to use Scala in 2008-2009. Now in April 2011, they further replaced the RoR front end to Java, see twitter's engineering log. The Netbeans IDE used to support RoR, but dropped it in 2011, see here.

Ruby will continue to have a seat in its corner. Ever ranked within top 10, and still in top 11 right now is quite an achievement. But I don't think it'll ever sweep the floor as claimed years ago.

Petabytes storage

Petabytes on a Budget v2.0: Revealing More Secrets