A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

Performance Analysis of Logs for (#SQL Server 2000/05, #IIS, #Exchange, #MOSS, #Active Directory) has been upgraded! Latest build is as of June 12, 2009, version 1.3.5. I have used version 1.3.4.3 prior to this but I'm about to install this latest version and take it for a spin. Can't wait to see what's new in this release. With PAL for SQL Server, you need to generate a .BLG file with pssdiag for SQL 2000 or SQLDIAG for 2005 and then use it as input for PAL. It will run a VBscript and generate an HTML report that you can submit to your manager for review. It shows all the important performance stats for SQL, disk performance and memory. I use it to find my performance hogs. No major changes seen so far. Get yours at Codeplex . Aslo good for log analysis of IIS, Exchange, BizTalk and other Microsoft Technologies. Requires .NET 2.0. Enjoy.

I can't believe I've never seen it in Ubuntu but something possessed me to look at power manager today and I found a few new goodies. This feature reminds me of perfmon in Windows only for power manager. It shows a lot of information regarding power management such as: power history, voltage history, charge/discharge time profile, charge/discharge time accuracy. It presents a nice graph with trends. This is another great way to see the performance of your laptop battery and one more plus for Ubuntu!

Today I tried to install SQL Server 2005 SP2 Cumulative Update 13 on one of servers and I received an error "Error code: 11009 No passive nodes successfully patched". This is a Windows 2003 32-bit cluster and after six successful installations of CU 13, it had to fail on a production server. Luckily this production server is not yet in production (he he) and thankfully Microsoft included rollback inside the update. It did update workstation tools but not the engine. Usually it fails when task scheduler or WMI is not running on the passive node. In today's case both services were running and I am yet to hear from Microsoft web support about the issue. What I did last time to fix was take the passive node out of the cluster and patch individually one by one each node. This was a special case because for some weird reason, the application vendor requires task scheduler to be a cluster-aware service and it must fail-over so I had to find another solution and that's what I