Over the past 2 days, I’ve gone full bore into Windows 7.  I’ve installed RC0 on 2 of my laptops, and so far I’m happy with the results.

The first installation was very quick and easy.  I had an unrecoverable operating system error on my XP installation, according to the hardware guys, and needed to reformat my machine.  I had just pulled down the bits for Win7 RC0, so I replaced the defective XP install on that machine with the 32 bit version of Windows 7.  This machine, a 2 year old off-the-shelf Dell with 2gb of RAM, performed quite well during and after the installation.  The install process only took 40 minutes, and Windows 7 had drivers for everything but my video card which, oddly enough, had to be configured using the 64 bit Vista driver.  Performance is excellent; the time from login to desktop readiness seems a little longer than on XP, but apart from that, it performs as well as the older OS.  My install of SQL Server 2008 Dev was easy and uneventful.

The second install was done as an upgrade to my Vista 64-bit machine.  I’ve only had this laptop for about 6 months, and have been disappointed in the performance despite having invested in hefty hardware.  I installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on this box, performing an upgrade rather than a clean install.  The upgrade took much longer than the clean install; it had run for over 2 hours when I finally gave up and left it to run overnight.  However, once completed, I could tell an immediate difference in performance.  It boots and loads my profile at least 30% faster than Vista, and so far I’ve found no compatibility problems.  I do have a message that warns me of a problem with my video driver management software, but the driver itself still loads up without error.  I had to reinstall the sound driver, but the Vista version on HP’s website installed quite nicely.  Both versions of SQL Server (2005 and 2008 Dev) seem to run fine in the upgraded OS.

So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the ease in which I was able to upgrade these systems to Windows 7.  I’m hopeful that the RTM version will be as easy a transition.  I’ll be sure to pass along any major problems I find, particularly those that affect SQL Server, Visual Studio, or their derivatives.

I broke down and bought my first Vista machine last Sunday, an HP Pavilion from a local box store.  From the outset I was underwhelmed by the performance of this system (a 64 bit system with 4gb of RAM), which should have been screaming but wasn't quite.  My 3 year old Gateway was running circles around this thing.

So after a few hours of removing what can only be described as factory-installed Crapware, this state of the art machine was still dragging.  I pinged my local SQL Server user group to solicit some recommendations which proved to be quite helpful.  I shut down the search indexing feature, ran a full defrag and bought an SD card to enable ReadyBoost, and these changes finally brought my system to an acceptable level of performance.  A few further tweaks and I am finally satisfied that I'm getting my money's worth.

On a positive note, I did not have any issues installing SQL Server 2005 or 2008 on this machine.  I had read of some early problems with SQL 2005 and Vista compatibility, but I did not find any problems.  VirtualPC 2007 runs well after installing machine additions on my new VM - I had been using VMWare for virtualization and was unaccustomed to this step.

So for now, Vista and I are getting along well.  We'll see how it goes.

It seems that I keep inheriting old systems that provide a singular, albeit mission critical, function to their owners. In the majority of these cases, I have encountered numerous small applications that were designed to run in a standalone environment to solve a very narrow problem or set of problems. The person who supports the application - which is very often the same person that wrote the code behind it - eventually departs the company without documenting his/her work. Somehow these database apps keep chugging along for months or years until one day a tragedy occurs - like a folder being renamed or a mapped drive being deleted. My phone rings, and I step out of my database analyst role and into my Sherlock Holmes coat.

I'm sure you've all been there. A problem that should take you 30 minutes to fix actually costs you two days because you have to reverse engineer the environment to figure out what the programmer or database designer was thinking. These kind of things get me more irritated than a cowboy without a saddle on a hot summer day.

It's not just for the sake of others that you document. I can't tell you how many times I've looked over some of my own handiwork and wondered what I had been thinking when I designed a feature or configured a particular database object. With few exceptions, I almost always fall back on my documentation at some point, even for the most trivial of things.

So I put out the call to all of my fellow IT folks, database analysts/programmers/sysadmins/[insert your job role here]. Document, document, document. Even if you're sure no one will ever need it, document. If you are creating an ETL database that you plan to delete in 90 days, document. If you write a function that's more than three lines long, document. Your successors will thank you for it. You might even save your own job some day!

If you've spent much time at all reading Steve Jones's blog posts and SSC editorials, you quickly glean that he finds working in solitude to be an interesting challenge. I'm sure that others could tell a similar story, but I had not experienced this for myself until recently. An upcoming renovation has forced me out of my permanent office and into a lonely area of the largely unoccupied top floor of our office building, and I'm getting a small taste of working alone.

To paint a picture for you, I'm now officed in a hastily assembled cubicle in a multipurpose room that's probably 50 feet by 25 feet. I'm the only person in that large room; in fact, I'm fairly certain that I am the only person not on the custodial staff to have set foot in that area in weeks. I'm used to sharing a space half this size with five other people, so it goes without saying that this is quite a departure from the work environment I'm used to.

Now I've only been here for a short time, and admittedly it's not quite the solitude that Steve describes in working from home on a remote Colorado ranch. However, I have learned a few things already about working solo. First of all, I discovered that I get much more done without the distractions of sharing space with others. I'm currently working on several projects that require a significant portion of my cerebral resources, and I've found that I can focus better for longer periods of time without the usual conversational distractions. Also, music seems to help me concentrate, and I am able to crank up the speakers and fill the room with my current favorite work tunes (this week, it's the Pirates 3 soundtrack). I've also noticed that my coffee lasts longer and my pens aren't disappearing nearly as quickly.

But alas, there are downsides to my newly found Camelot. First, I've found that those little 'conversational distractions' are actually useful and necessary to maintain sanity. All work and no play makes you want to hurl yourself from a 5th floor window, and after a while working alone you realize how much you crave interaction with colleagues. I've also discovered that you must work a little harder to stay on the radar of the brass. Out of sight is out of mind, so you must take extra steps to make sure your hard work doesn't go unnoticed. Additionally, there is some implicit travel involved when you do most of your work apart from others; any meeting or other face-to-face time requires a trip to the mother ship. On the softer side, it's not nearly as satisfying to complain about the Rangers when there's nobody around to listen.

Update: It's been two days since I wrote the last paragraph, and I have since learned that I will be joined by several colleagues in my new temporary space. Hence, my foray into solitude shall end with a whimper. At least I got to find out what it was like for a while. I will enjoy having the company again, though....