And no, the traditional (MS) answer that you should do a reserved checkout simply doesn’t work for 2 reasons

1/ having used the ‘edit-merge-commit’ pattern most of my professional life, I just *refuse* to go back to a checkout-edit-checkin way of working (for one project, I was forced to use VSS, and, to say it nicely, I didn’t enjoy it). This is 2008 you know?!

2/ What about branches and merging? Nope, thought so!

I just cannot imagine that they do not have ‘decent support for teamwork’ as one of their top (non-functional) requirements!! Even the best product (and SSIS clearly is not, IMHO) would be close to useless if it didn’t support this!

I’m probably not the only VMware user who has underestimated the amount of disk space he needs, only to find out a couple of months later, that the disk is filling up faster than expected. Fortunately, this is (relatively) easy to fix. That is, if you have enough ‘real’ HD space of course!

Warning: always backup your data before doing things like changing partitions etc…!  

First, download a copy of vdiskmanager-GUI (oh, I forgot to mention: I will explain how to do this on a Mac). I could only find it here (technically speaking you don’t need this, as it is just a wrapper around the VMware provided vmware-vdiskmanager command-line tool). Open this tool, and select the ‘Expand’ tab. Choose the vmdk (virtual disk image) you want to expand, and enter its desired size (6Gb in my case):

If you click ‘Go’, the vmdk file will expand to the desired size.

 For those of you that don’t have a mac: you really should No, you can easily accomplish the same thing: on the bottom of the screen you can see the command that will be executed if you click ‘Go’. So just locate vmware-vdiskmanager (it is probably somewhere in your c:\program files\vmware directory, and run it with -x <desired size> <path_to_vmdk>. This should do the trick.  Or even better,  just download the VMware-diskmanager GUI for PC here.

  When you reboot the VM, you might be surprised to see that you hard disk in your guest OS (say, Windows XP in this case), is still at its original size! Although it might sound confusing, it is actually perfectly logical, as we haven’t changed the partition, we only changed the ‘hard disk’ the partition is residing on. One way of ‘fixing’ this is doing a complete reinstall of the system, thereby repartitioning the disk. Although it works, it’s certainly not something most of us will look forward to (as it erases all of your current apps and data).

Luckily for us, there is a much simpler way. Just download a copy of a gparted live-cd (ie a cd that is bootable). gparted is the Gnome Partition Editor, which is a linux tool to, you probably guessed it, edit partitions. Although it is linux tool, it does support ntfs, which should be the Windows filesystem you’re using (a list of the supported filesystems). And even better: since it is a live-cd, you don’t even have to install anything. Just download the iso file, and connect the CD player of your VM to this ISO:

Now the tricky part: in order to run gparted, you have to start your VM, but force it to boot from this CD instead of your HD. The traditional way of doing this, is to press F2 to enter the BIOS setup. However, under VMware, this is a trail-and-error process, as you have to be really fast to press F2 or it will just boot from the HD.

Fortunately, there is a work-around. In your .vmx file, just add  

bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”

This forces VMware to enter the BIOS setup on the next boot (this setting is automatically set to FALSE). In the BIOS, make sure that your CD drive is above your hard drive, exit the BIOS and restart the VM.  

Now you should see linux booting, and gparted will automatically start-up (I selected the default setting on the first list, then just pick your keyboard and language settings from the list). 

If the disk you want to expand, is not already selected, use the drop-down to select it. Then, click ‘Resize/Move’ and either visually resize the partition, or just enter its new size:

Close the dialog  (‘Resize/Move’) and click ‘Apply’ to actually perform the partition change. After this is done, exit gparted and disconnect the iso from the CD. If necessary, change the boot order in the BIOS setup, and restart into your guest OS. In Windows, this will typically bring up the chkdsk utility. This will check your partition (which is probably a good thing). After that is done: you can start to use that newly added disk space! 

Create the parameters key in the following location :
HKLM/system/currentcontrolset/services/csc/parameters

Then within the parameters key, create a DWORD Value named FormatDatabase with a value of 1 (hex) then reboot the machine.

(found here)

She’s soooo cute! Words cannot describe the feelings that went through me the moment she was born. It’s the most intense moment of my life! And the cliches are true: my wife and I are very proud, but also very tired parents

Note: this list was taken from here


SELECT *
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_name = 'your_table_name' AND
OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(TABLE_NAME), 'TableHasIdentity') = 0



use tempdb
go
sp_helpfile
go


to see where the tempdb files are located at the moment (you’ll need this path in a moment). Move them to another place with


use master
go
Alter database tempdb modify file (name = tempdev, filename = 'd:\databases\tempdb.mdf')
go
Alter database tempdb modify file (name = templog, filename = 'e:\database_logs\templog.ldf')
go


and restart SQL Server. However, I noticed that even after the restart, the c: disk was still being used for the tempdb! The solution turned out to be to delete the tempdb.mdf and templog.ldf files on the c: disk (see the paths returned by sp_helpfile before the move).