Ken Henderson's WebLog

In The Art of War , Sun Tzu said, "If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." But, he went on to warn, "If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat....

I've always found the story of the early days of the PC industry to be extremely interesting. One reason for this is that I experienced those early days myself. I have my own memories of them. Another is that the PC's eventual rise to prominence is the...

I've always felt that proficiency in the command language of an OS was an essential part of being able to write code for it. I suppose it's possible to write code in a high-level language all day without knowing anything about writing batch files, but...

In yesterday's entry , I talked about self-replicating programs and how educational it can be to construct them. Commonly known in hacking parlance as quines , these self-reproducing programs force us to think about how our language works and are a good...

This is an oldie, but a goodie. It's an article by Ken Thompson about, among other things, writing self-replicating programs. Thompson is one of my heroes and someone who's had a profound impact on the industry. His list of accomplishments is too long...

For those interested in such things, there's a poem over on my personal blog having to do with history, politics, and religion. Enough of my friends have been stumped by it that I thought I'd post it publicly to see how many could figure out who it was...

You may have noticed that the sample blocking detection script in KB articles 251004 and 271509 uses WAITFOR in a loop in order to run the sp_blocker_pss NN stored procedure. Ever wonder why that is? Why wouldn’t we schedule the execution of the procedure...

I have a number of sites I frequent and do business with, but I'm sure there are plenty of great ones that I don't know about. I'm interested to hear about the ones that you visit often. Here's my list: 1. Books, CDs, and sometimes other stuff: Amazon...

...not at least as far as the database engine is concerned, anyway. As frequently as the subject of query timeouts comes up with applications based on SQL Server, people are often surprised to learn that query timeouts are a client-side concept only....

I've been hearing from some folk that they consider the SQLCLR functionality in SQL Server 2005 to be a potential security hole. Some have even gone so far as to say that they plan to leave it disabled (it's not enabled by default). When pressed, many...

It's pretty common for a complex app to make multiple connections to SQL Server. And, on SQL Server 2000 and earlier releases, it's also very easy for those types of app to cause perf problems by distributing their workload across their connections unevenly...

I'm considering replacing my SmartPhone (a Motorola MPX200) with something else. I've developed a real love-hate relationship with my phone. I like all the "smart" functionality, but I hate what a rotten phone it is on occasion. I often go straight from...

Today's bug challenge is a design bug. Came across some C code like this awhile back (this is pseudo code and has all "work" elements removed from it): void AddID( char * pszObjID) { char szID[8]; //Pad the ID with spaces strcpy(szID...

Here's an excerpt from an sp_OA proc code example in the SQL Server 2000 Books Online: DECLARE @object int DECLARE @hr int DECLARE @property varchar(255) DECLARE @return varchar(255) DECLARE @src varchar(255), @desc varchar(255) -- Create an object...

Question: On 64-bit SQL Server, which tends to be larger: the Buffer Pool or the MemToLeave region? Because it usually dominates the user mode portion of 32-bit SQL Server's process address space, it might make sense to assume that the BPool is usually...

As I think many of you know, I'm updating my SQL Server books for SQL Server 2005. I'm currently wrestling with something that I've decided to put to a vote. The question before me is whether to include the Windows fundamentals coverage that was in the...

...was probably one I didn't even get to attend. Adam Machanic introduced himself to me at the Mercy Wine Bar outing some of us did Thursday night after the VIP Reception in Las Colinas. He mentioned his "Best Practices for Structured SQL Server Development...