In the instructions for Oracles January Critical Update database administrators might be surprised to find that downtime is required for their enviornment.

DTS's were so... simple, but with a more robust implementation comes complexity. Using Microsoft’s SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio you can create powerful automated packages known as SSIS packages which have taken the place of the DTS. To get started select new project from the File menu and choose Integrated Services project.

Recently I was working on a project that involved scrubbing data from an oracle instance for a development environment. The data needed to remain intact so that foreign key constraints would be observed, but private information needed to be randomized and/or erased to protect users.

I've made a commitment to start regularly (at least twice a week) posting about something that I have encountered related to IT. As I get used to the idea of blogging about subjects the material will become more involved, but at first I will probably keep the subjects light and introductory in nature.

Pascal, Scheme and Prolog - oh my. The last class in Computer Science at Liberty is Theory of Programming Languages. The professor, Solomon Gifford, is a graduate from Virginia Tech and tried to structure his courses in a similar fashion to that of his alma mater. At Tech, the course requires students to implement an interpreter for 4 different sample languages in 4 different base languages.

I wasn't very impressed with the stands that my local fish store was selling so I started searching online. Several sites sold beautiful solid wood stands in a variety of different styles and colors. I picked out one that I liked best and asked for a quote. The manufacturer said $1600! I decided that I would attempt to make my own...

Eventually most people run out of space at some time or another. Fortunately GFS provides functionality essentially identical to software raid. For example, your company’s website lives on a 4 node cluster that shares its webroot on GFS. Your website becomes extremely successful and the storage requirements grow dramatically.

Wired magazine has been publishing increasingly liberal material over the last 2 years.

I have had a subscription to Wired Magazine for almost 2 years now. The magazine usually has great technical articles on a wide variety of subjects ranging from new gadgets to scientific topics. The November issue arrived in late October with the cover story that read "The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the crusade against religion." I was immediately displeased as I normally look forward to reading the main article and this focus wasn't going to be pleasurable.