BI review & help

OpenSearch is one of the beautiful things I discovered lately. If you're using Firefox 2 and above or Internet Explorer 7, look at the search field in the right-top corner of the browser. See the shiny little thingy there? Click on it and you can instantly add two new search engines for fast search through your browser. The first one is my blog's search and the second (and more important) one is the ability to search BiBlogs right from the browser. Yeah, now you can search the whole BI community's blogs with only one click.

I call all the BI bloggers to add this too. It's 5 minutes work and it can help lot of people out there. See here for instructions.

When you practice on SQL Server on your local machine you don't want that its services will start up with the computer. As I mentioned before, you should declare the startup method of these services as manual (see here). After that, you can build two simple batch files that will start and stop the services. Believe me - it's very comfotable to start and stop the services with only one mouse click. The first batch file (I called it sql.bat) contains only two lines:

net start MSSQLSERVER
net start MSSqlServerOLAPService

The second one (sqlend.bat) looks like that:

net stop MSSQLSERVER
net stop MSSqlServerOLAPService

Note that I only start/stop the SQL Server and analysis services, but you can do whatever you like.

Have fun.

Sometimes the uninstall process does not succeed or even worse - the "Add or Remove programs" interface does not allow you to uninstall the product because it already uninstalled / doesn't exist / you name it. The problem is that the uninstalled program can't be removed from the list, it can't be uninstalled and it prevents another installation or re-installation. This happens a lot with Microsoft's heavy products such as SQL Server and Visual Studio but it can also happen with other products too.
What can you do?

Here's a small tip: Open the registry editor (Start -> Run -> regedit) and go to the path: My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall.
Under this folder you'll see many folders with GUI names such as {1268CDD4-0FED-3CE6-8A9D-C3B012ABCD8F}. To know what installation it is, look for the key named DisplayName under this GUI folder. In most of these folders you'll see a key named UninstallString. To uninstall this program, copy the value of UninstallString and paste it in the run dialog. This will start the uninstall process.

This trick will not always work, but it can help you a lot. Especially with broken installation of SQL Server.

Enjoy.

Some has asked me why I don't blog anymore. The answer is simple - say hello to Hadas, my new daughter. Because of the birth we moved to a new apartment few weeks ago and in the last Sunday my wife, Noga, gave birth to Hadas. Now it is time to keep on the blogging. Be High!
P.S
Here you can see more Hadas's photos.