This afternoon was quite interesting around the office. A strong thunderstorm moved through the area, a common occurrence in Texas during the spring. However, this storm took out a critical transformer nearby and knocked out the power grid for some time. Our emergency generators roared to life without a hitch, and critical systems stayed online on supplemental power until electricity was restored an hour or so later. One glitch was observed in cooling: the air in the NOC was running but the cooling unit was not. Fortunately, the outage did not last long enough to increase the temperature to a critical level.
We run tests on these types of events – in fact, our facilities staff tests the generators on a semimonthly basis, and we actually fail over to the backup power during those tests. It has been some time since we’ve run on backup power for more than a few minutes.
In my corner, I was particularly thankful for the desktop UPS unit I have running. It’s small and aging, and doesn’t have the longevity it used to, but it allowed me more than 20 minutes to finish up what I was doing and shut down my computer properly. I did notice that my speaker system and desk lamp are both connected to the UPS, which is an unnecessary drain on the battery. Time to crawl in the floor and rewire.
Nobody likes to run power failure tests, and it’s even less enjoyable to run this drill for real. But in times such as these, it’s good to know that your backup systems are regularly tested and sufficient to continue critical operations.
I’m getting my first taste of the new SQL Report Builder 2.0, and so far I’m enjoying the upgrade. Report Builder 2.0 is a standalone product, shipped as separate download from the SQL Server and Visual Studio suites. It allows users to develop and run reports locally, in addition to permitting the publication of these reports to SQL Server Reporting Services.
To call Report Builder 2.0 an upgrade is not entirely accurate; it is actually a completely new product that supplements (and in my opinion, surpasses) the ClickOnce web product branded as the 1.0 product of the same name. The later version does not require a predefined data model like its predecessor; report designers can connect directly to database objects without the need for another layer of abstraction. The interface is intuitive enough for non-DBAs, but also allows directly writing or editing SQL queries for more advanced users. The earlier version is still available on SQL Server Reporting Services, but I suspect that it will be all but abandoned in lieu of Report Builder 2.0.
I had planned on writing an article on getting started with Report Builder 2.0, but I was beaten to the punch by an author over at another site. The article provides a good starting point for using Report Builder 2.0, and can be found here.
One little quirk that I’ve found is that there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to associate seemingly unrelated database objects, in my case a couple of views I’ve created to abstract the data. I posted this question on the SSC forums to see if anyone else has encountered the same problem. For obvious reasons, I’d rather not ask my end users to write their own INNER JOINs when building reports.
The free download for Report Builder 2.0 can be found here.
During the month of February, I participated in the Get Fit in February challenge last month. Along with a few hundred other folks, mostly technical professionals, I set an aggressive weight loss goal and worked hard to meet the goal. Although I didn’t hit the mark I set for myself (12 pounds), I did lose a significant amount of weight (9 pounds) during the month, and trimmed off at least an inch from my waist. Through this process, I have learned some things that worked for me, and a few others that didn’t, when trying to lose weight. More importantly, I gained some additional confidence along the way, proving that I can make significant sacrifices when I set my mind to something.
Where to from here? I’m still looking to lose more weight – ideally, I should be about 15 pounds lighter than my current weight. I’ll continue to eat responsibly and stay physical to continue my weight loss, though it certainly won’t come as quickly as it did in February. I intend to drop a pound a week for the next 10 weeks, which will put me within spitting distance of my final goal just in time for summer.
