Installing Second Hard Drive

DISCLAIMER: I am not a hardware guy, nor am I a sysadmin type. But I'm trying to do things on the cheap in the DIY spirit. A friend gave me some old hardware, and I'm using it to try and upgrade my old desktop. I had some misadventures last night trying to install a second IDE drive on my Dell Optiplex 270 (yes I know it's old, it's just a lab computer). The drive is a 40gb Seagate that I'm planning on using for TempDb. When I first put it in, I didn't change the jumper settings, so the pc thought I had two master IDE drives. This caused BIG problems in BIOS. I could no longer boot, and my computer no longer recognized my original master drive. I changed the jumper settings of the second drive and tried to reboot - no luck. Now the pc was reporting TWO unknown drives (which I suppose is progress). I played around with the BIOS settings, but again, no luck. Then today after googling the task, I came across this how-to article that explains that the IDE cable that connects the IDE drives to the motherboard must be plugged in to the drives in a very specific way. The instructions worked perfectly. When I booted up in Windows, I noticed that that drive had two partitions of 20gb each. Wanting to use the entire drive for my new TempDb, I researched how to delete the partitions and reformat.

T-SQL Challenge #33

Just finished T-SQL Challenge #33. It was less challenging than some of the others (I finished it in under 20 minutes), but the problem was interesting enough and still required the declarative thinking that is the aim of these challenges.

Also last week R. Barry Young published articles on how to gain this mode of thinking: "There Must Be 15 Ways To Lose Your Cursors... part 1, Introduction".

SQL Search Tool

I'm not big on 3rd party plug-in tools, and am not much for shilling for companies, but I LOVE Red Gate's SQL Search product. It makes searching your database for text fragments very easy (like when you analyze the impact of changing a column name, for example), and displays the results in an easy-to-use interface that enables you to click and edit the affected objects.

Needle in a Haystack

While working on loading 13m rows into a staging table, a name-parsing routine came across unexpected data, and the load failed. One of the greatest drawbacks to set-based ETL such as T-SQL, versus row- or batch-based ETL tools such as Informatica or SSIS, is that data discrepancies cause failures that are difficult to diagnose. In this case, the load failed with the error:

"Msg 537, Level 16, State 5, Procedure spd_Load_Stg_Names, Line 31
Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function.
The statement has been terminated."

This is almost useless as far as finding the problem data, as it does not tell me what value, or which row, caused the failure.