CSVed – The World’s Best (free) CSV Editor/Viewer

If you work with data, you won’t be able to avoid delimited files for very long.  Sometimes you have to open these files.  If you don’t have Excel installed, you might end up having to use trusty old Notepad, which is not ideal from either a formatting or large file size perspective.  Excel is better, but no matter how you try to gloss it over, Excel is not designed as a delimited file viewer.

I have found that the right tool for the job in this case is a program that I have been using for years now called CSVed.  The newest version updates the UI, but there are tons of tools packed into this program and it can handle almost any file I have ever thrown at it, including 1GB+ files and delimited files that have bad data.  There is a unicode version of the program available as well should you need it.

Here is a link to the development homepage, you can download the latest version from there.

Complete SQL 2012 Demo Build Script

There is no need to download the 28GB BI Image X (which at the time of this writing hasn’t been updated to SQL 2012 RTM).  There are instructions on how to build an all-up SQL 2012 and SharePoint 2010 demo VM with instructions for configuring all of the latest SQL 2012 tools including DQS, MDM, PowerPivot for SharePoint and more.  The full instructions are here.  This is a great way to familiarize yourself with a full deployment of the latest BI software from Microsoft.

Here’s the summary from the link above:

This how-to article will guide you through the process of building a Hyper-V virtual machine with Microsoft SQL Server 2012, the latest Visual Studio 2010 development tools, SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), and an assortment of other software products to create a test environment ready for testing and product demos.

Fix for Excessive VMWare Disk Activity On Host After Suspend or Shutdown

I use VMware to run 64-bit guest OS’s for development and testing on my laptop.  (Windows 7 only allows 32-bit guests, Windows 8 incorporates Hyper-V so this limitation will go away soon).  One of the nice benefits of running a VM is that I can suspend and bring it back online in a matter of seconds each time I want to use the VM.  Unfortunately, this comes with a negative side effect – the drive on the host that I am storing the VMs on thrashes for up to 15 minutes after VMWare was closed.  At the end of the day, if I had just suspended my VM and tried to shut down the Windows 7 host OS, it would take 15 minutes to shut down the laptop.

Fortunately I found the fix on a SharePoint blog.  Essentially you have add a setting to the VMWare config file.  For VMWare 7, the file is located here: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini.  The setting that you need to add is mainMem.useNamedFile = “false”.  One thing to be careful of is if you copy/paste from the web, the quotes on the “false” will be curly directional style rather than the straight kind that are required for the config file.

One other setting that I changed was in the main preferences for VMWare under the Memory tab, I set the “How should the system allocate memory for virtual machines?’ to “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”.  I am able to do this since I have 16GB of RAM on my laptop, not sure if this is quite as feasible with less RAM.

Index of all SQL Server build numbers since 7.0 Beta

Stumbled across a nice SQL Server build number site a while back that has a comprehensive (I think?) list of every SQL Server build from the SQL 7 beta 3 up through SQL 2012 RC1 including every CU and hotfix along the way.  There is also a link to download the KB that corresponds to each build if appropriate.  If you happen to know of a build that isn’t listed, it looks like this site is somewhat crowd-sourced, so post the details in the comments and it will likely make it up to the main page.

(If you look in the comments, you can even find little “anonymous” nuggets, such as the following: “SQL2012 RTM is 11.0.2100.19”)

Cross posting company blogs

I have been posting mostly to my company’s blog site recently, but for some reason those posts are not appearing in search results so I am going to post some of those entries here in case anyone else will benefit from them.

How to fix SQL Server Error "Cannot Generate SSPI Context"

I have gotten this error multiple times and finally found the fix. I always get it when I have a new server up on the network and try to connect back to it from SSMS on another machine. I can't tell you exactly what causes it, since I don't get it consistently across machines. The quick answer is: Change the account that SQL Server itself runs under to LocalSystem.

*Edit* Removed link to SQL Server Pro that stopped working.

Vonage Part 1 - I am a skeptic

I am an early adopter of almost anything technology related. However, it is 2009 and many of my friends have VoIP and I am still a skeptic. I recently upgraded from my puny DSL connection (6Mbps/384Kbps) to cable at 30Mbps/8Mbps. Because that breaks my bundle with at&t, I decided to drop my voice and long distance with them, and switch to Vonage. A lot of my friends have VoIP, and many of them actually have Vonage and despite all the HORRIBLE reviews on the Internet for Vonage, they all say that it is great, reliable, works as advertised.

So, tonight I picked up a $150 set of Vonage phones at Fry's, free after rebate. Apparently they let me listen to Vonage voicemail directly from the phones. Sounds good. I just signed up for the Vonage service. The first thing that annoyed me is that by buying the phones in the store (rebate or not), I am not able to enter a promo code that I have been planning to use. I get the first month free, but still have to pay activation. My promo would have saved me $15/month for the first three months and free activation ($30+). Total savings of $75 instead of the $25 I saved for the first month. So. . . I guess the great limited time offer I got on the phones wasn't as good as I thought since I am still paying $50 for them, essentially. Sneaky Vonage, very sneaky. And I don't like it. And I am going to tell all my friends that this is how my relationship with you started out. We'll see if it gets better.

Next thing I noticed: If I ever want to cancel service, there is a $39.99 cancellation fee. WHAT? Are you serious? So. . . anytime I want to cancel, I basically owe them for 1.7 extra months of service. THAT IS NOT COOL! Again, I feel like I am being tricked. Don't trick me, I will figure it out, and it will cause me to say bad things about you to everyone I know. I promise you that. I will forgive, but I will never forget.

Now, I haven't connected the service yet. But Vonage hasn't done a whole heck of a lot to make me comfortable yet with these sneaky little tricks that they are pulling. We shall see what happens, and you can believe that I plan to post it here on my blog, ESPECIALLY if it is not good.