Monitoring SQL Server on the cheap

Use WMI with Python. Thanks to Tim Golden, Python on Win32 (I use ActiveState Python) can use COM to talk to WMI. WMI allows you to run SQL-like queries to determine available memory, free disk space, database size, transaction log size, transaction log space available, when a database was last backed up, ... all of the good stuff.

Any DBA knows that databases need free disk space and frequent backups. I don't want to imply that this is the only work a DBA would perform, but I have worked at shops where there really wasn't a DBA in our department. My programs occasionally failed because there was no disk space, and the transaction logs had not been backed up for a few weeks (sure, the database was backed up, but not the logs).

If you don't want to use WMI, SqlServerCentral has some great articles for SQL 2000 and 2005. Give them time and they will have 2008 as well. If you want to to check a backup, try this.

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Castle ActiveRecord with DetachedCriteria

My current development environment is Visual Studio Express C# Edition (read that as free ), Castle ActiveRecord's latest svn trunk(usually within a few days), and NHibernate svn trunk. As of NHibernate version 1.2.0, there is a very cool new class out there ... DetachedCriteria. This class lets you set all of your Castle relational attributes like BelongsTo, HasMany, etc. as lazy fetch, and over-ride this for searches, reports, or anytime you know ahead of time that you will be touching the related classes by calling detachedCriteria.SetFetchMode(..., FetchEnum.Eager). As a good netizen, I have tried to contribute to NHibernate and Castle ActiveRecord even if only in the smallest of ways . Oh yeah, I tried mapping to a SQL VIEW, and it worked GREAT! I received a comment after my last post, indicating that there is a better way, and I am sure of it, but the view guaranteed that I only have one database request for my dataset. NHibernate was wanting to re-fetch my missing as...

Castle ActiveRecord calling a Stored Procedure

Update: I have contributed patch AR-156 that allows full integration of Insert, Update and Delete to ActiveRecord models . If you've been reading my blog lately, you know that I have been seriously testing the Castle ActiveRecord framework out. I really love it, but I have an existing Microsoft SQL Server database with many stored procedures in it. I have tested the ActiveRecord model out, and I am sure that I will learn enough to be able to use it for standard CRUD (create, read, update, delete aka. insert, select, update, delete) functionality. BUT ... If I really want to integrate with my existing billing procedures, etc, I will have to be able to call stored procedures. I have taken two approaches ... write the ARHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(targetType, dmlString) method that gets a connection for the supplied type, executes dmlString, and closes it. write the ARHelper.RegisterCustomMapping(targetType, xmlString) method that allows me to add mappings that refer to my auto-gener...

Castle Active Record Code Generator

I have finally released my Code Generator to Google Code as Active-Record-Gen . What does it generate? It generates ActiveRecord classes mainly, but I have used it to generate stored procedures and sys-admin scripts as well. This code generator does not (yet) generate a full Windows application project or a Mono-Rail web site, but the generated code could be used in either. In fact, with a few tweaks, this could be used to generate NHibernate "poco" and .xbm files. If you want to know more, look at the screen shots above, or head over to Google Code and run it. In my haste to make my first EXE release before supper, I forgot to add the Template directory, which should be at the same directory level as the EXE and config files. I just (1.5 hours later) uploaded a new EXE, but 2 people have already downloaded the EXE (not the source though). As for the basic table object, it is built with the following assumptions: Table name is plural, class name is singular. Field ...

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