Entries for MetaGunny

SQL Transaction Blocking On Foreign Key [SQL Transaction Blocking On Foreign Key]

MetaGunny — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:18:59 GMT

I'll try to keep this short. I have about 4 inserts I'm doing.

The first insert is into a users table in a users database.

The second insert is into a customers table in a billing database, that returns a customer id.

The next 3 inserts are into other tables that have customerid as a foreign key.

The odd thing is the first two are fine. Which are an addresses table insert and a credit card table insert. I pass in the customerid and it inserts fine.

However, the one I'm having trouble with is a table called product subscriptions.

These are all simple inserts. The product subscriptions doesn't have anymore relationships than the others, and the relationships it does have doesn't have any relationships to the customers or other tables. It only has a relationship to products, etc.

Now, to backup, all of these are controlled by a sqltransaction ado.net object.

When first debugging, I commented out hte product subscriptoins insert, and it worked fine and didn't hang.

I also tried moving it up before the other two inserts, but then it hung.

Also, what is odd is I did a select on all tables with no locking and the product subscriptions insert is happening, the data is there.

To get it to work, I modified the relationship to NOT ENFORCE RI on inserts or updates.

So, it's now working. However, it doesn't make any sense. The ONLY difference I can see between the product subscriptions insert and others, is that I pass in a CODE, that I then do a select on the product tables for the product id, the other two I just pass in directly the ID.

I know it's hard to debug this without anyone seeing the actual code. I thought I'd post this to see if anyone ran across a similar problem.

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Silverlight On the Radio [Silverlight On the Radio]

MetaGunny — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 18:42:42 GMT

I watched the Scott Guthrie video on silverlight a couple of days ago, and when he mentioned he sees bigger numbers every day from his reporting on installs, I wondered how they're getting installs other than the halo 3 trailer.

Anyway, I listen to talk radio online for a specific radio station when I used to live in Southern CA, and I've seen several ads today for Silverlight.

I guess that means Silverlight is for real and for the masses!

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Queue - Processing In Order [Queue - Processing In Order]

MetaGunny — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:02:37 GMT

Okay. I have a question about the method that I was going to use to process items in a queue in order.

Let's say I have a queue, with a bunch of records, doesn't matt of what. The main point is that each queue, let's say, belongs to a certain account, so let's say we have an AccountID with each queue item.

It may look like this:

Account ID, Record
543, 1
123, 2
543, 3
543, 4

Okay, now, the main criteria here is that I don't want to process record 4 for account id 543 before record 1 is processed for account id 543.

Basically, to keep it simple, let's just say I'm grabbing all the records and then throwing them in a thread pool.

Here is how I was going to do the processing:

1) The first method I was going to do is when I'm looping through the records and throwing them in the thread pool, is on each iteration only throw in unique account id's. So, on the first iterationof the above data, I would only throw records 1 and 2 in. The idea is that if I grab 1000 records at a time, hopefully this will help prevent locking with the second method I use.

2). The second method I use is when I go to process the record, I was going to use SyncLock thread locking method to grab an object for that specific account id. So, when the the next thread comes to process that account id, it would wait until that object is released.

What do you guys think? Or, what is a better method?

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More Advanced ThreadPool [More Advanced ThreadPool]

MetaGunny — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:53:53 GMT

I started using .NET 2.0 a couple of months ago and I knew I had this problem coming up soon and I was hoping the threadpool was enhanced. It doesn't look like it was.

Or, am I wrong and is there a more advanced threadpool or one already well written out there?

Basically, I don't want to throw a million items into the threadpool uncontrolled.

Here is going to be the flow:

1) Pick up all of the unprocessed records in the queue from the database. I'd probably limit it to 10000 or so at a time.

2) Limit it to processing 20 or so at a time.

3) After they are all completed, go back to the database and get the next 10000.

4) If a request comes in to stop, I want it to gracefully shut down and finish the 20 remaining items, rather than calling the join method or whatever it is to stop all threads immediately.

The main problem is when you use the .net threadpool and call adduserworkitem it will internally queue up all of the items and there is no way to see how many are completed, or to stop them gracefully.

The main thing is I don't want items processing while I perform the call to get the next 1000 records, that is why I want to make sure all are fully completed before going back to step 1.

I actually wrote a threadpool manager that did this but it had some problems where it would stop processing. I wanted to see if there is an elegant solution built-in, or anyone had any suggestions.

Thanks

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Outlook Contact AutoComplete [Outlook Contact AutoComplete]

MetaGunny — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:42:53 GMT

Is it just me, or does the outlook contact autocomplete, to be polite, not work so well?

It's weird. It doesn't pop-up people that are actually in my contacts. Sometimes when I type the last name, then first, it may pop up what is in my contacts section of outlook.

Other than that, it's very good at popping up suggestions for people that are NOT in my contacts, and I rarely if ever e-mail.

For example, for some odd reason, someone that is in my contacts, and I CC on almost every e-mail, it never suggests. If I enter the name, when I hit send, or hit ctrl-k, it puts in the correct e-mail.

Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone knew of a fix for this. I tried searching.

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Excluding Validator From Validation Summary [Excluding Validator From Validation Summary]

MetaGunny — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:32:37 GMT

I can't find any methods or properties to exclude a validator from being included in the validation summary. Anyone know how to do this? I'm thinking about writing my own validation summary in a sense to get around this, but though I'd check to see if there is a built-in method.

I want to have a red asterisk next to the textbox that has the error, and then the error message in the validation summary.

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Visual Studio 2002 and Visual Studio 2005 Compatibility [Visual Studio 2002 and Visual Studio 2005 Compatibility]

MetaGunny — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 07:49:04 GMT

I believe I read somewhere it was safe to install Visual Studio .NET 2005 on the same machine as VS 2002.

Is this correct? Has anyone had any issues?

I want to continue doing old projects in 2002 but new projects in 2005.

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Whose Bright Idea Was This? [Whose Bright Idea Was This?]

MetaGunny — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:05:45 GMT

I don't know whose idea it was to break the videos up into pieces but if you want to ruin channel 9 keep posting the videos this way.

I'm sorry but it's absolutely idiotic. I used to watch videos every day while I work, now I barely watch any. I don't want to keep coming back and sorting through trying to find the next part. It's just a hassle and a pain in the butt and I'm not going to jump through hoops to support C9, no matter how much I like the content.

Also, I mean really, what is the point? To help people that don't watch the whole video in one go? Fine, then let them watch it on their own pace and in their own "parts", however they want to break it up. If they want to watch 15 mins here and there, let them, what is stopping them? They can watch however long they want, and later come back and skip ahead if they want right now.

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Dual CPU Server Needed? Seems to Expensive [Dual CPU Server Needed? Seems to Expensive]

MetaGunny — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:51:24 GMT

I went to price a 1U server at Dell and the price seemed outrageous, about 6K. However, it could be because I don't understand the CPU part as much as I should.

I priced a server with two cpu's (each dual core). However, is that really needed or is a single chip dual core the equivalent of a two cpu server before? (Essentially, was I pricing a real 4 way server?)

Basically, my question is, would a single chip with dual core be about the same performance or more as an older xeon single core dual cpu server?

I understand that the server I need depends on many things, my workload, what I'm using it for, etc. However, like I said, I thought I would want at least a dual cpu server.

I bought my own personal workstation for around 3,500 a couple of years ago with a dual cpu xeon server with hyperthreading that shows as 4 CPU's, at 2GHZ. I think these were 2.33 ghz.

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Multi-Core Issue? [Multi-Core Issue?]

MetaGunny — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:20:11 GMT

Can someone please explain the multi-core issue?

I don't understand why it's more of a programming issue now. Doesn't the OS just see it as another CPU and use it accordingly? As long as the app or game or whatever it is is multi-threaded, what else does it have to do?

This seems to be more of an operating system level thing.

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Snail Mail Microsoft A Bug? [Snail Mail Microsoft A Bug?]

MetaGunny — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:22:38 GMT

Okay. I've been meaning to register and make a post but something finally pushed me to.

I heard about channel 9 and watched a video here and there. But what really got me going and I've watched a ton of videos since is getting a dual monitor setup and a faster internet connection. Being able to get the faster internet connection was due to moving.

Anyway, the point is I've watched all these videos and it seems like Microsoft really wants to hear from people. I had this problem that was bugging me for awhile where the users would complain off and on for awhile. I would try to fix it, couldn't find it, nothing looked wrong. Finally, I had to fix it, and I think I actually found a bug in sql server 2000 with how it actually updates the data, so not a trivial bug.

I e-mail it to Microsoft and after a back and forth they tell me to snail mail it to them!! I almost fell over laughing, a technology company telling me to snail mail them a bug. To be fair, they also said I could call up but this isn't something I can explain over the phone. That is why in the e-mail I provided a sample table create script and the stored procedure.

Anyway, I just thought that was funny. I'd love to see more videos about the inside part of Microsoft or more about how the actual hardware works. A good example of the inside is the video where the guy who debugs microsoft.com is interviewed. Also, it's great having Rory. It seems like he has the same viewpoint that I come from, in terms of just being a business developer and always wondering how games are made, device drivers, etc.

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