Irrelevant musings about software development

A few weeks back, I wrote about Mac blogging software. Since then, I've removed Ecto. It was way to clunky, and not a joy to use at all. I've downloaded Blogo and figured I'd give it a whirl. So far, its pretty good. But none of these are like Windows Live Writer, which is really what I want. Oh well, can't have it all unless you write it yourself.

As our production database gets more and more data in it, we noticed that things were slowing down. I ran SQL Profiler trying to figure out if we needed to ad more indexes, better arrange the data, or anything we could do to improve the performance. After about an hour of running queries, creating indexes, profiling, and looking at execution plans; I had gotten barely anything for performance gains.

I then decided to take a different track and wondered if our indexes needed to be rebuilt.  A quick Google later, and I came across an article on Tips for Rebuilding Indexes over at SQL Server Performance.

The gist of the article is your indexes get fragmented and need to be rebuilt. I ran the script present in the article and noticed a substantial improvement in performance.  I failed to capture metrics to quantify the performance improvements, but the users definitely noticed.

Without further ado, here is the script from the article:

If your using MS SQL Server 2000:

USE DatabaseName --Enter the name of the database you want to reindex

DECLARE @TableName varchar(255)

DECLARE TableCursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_type = 'base table'

OPEN TableCursor

FETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @TableName
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
DBCC DBREINDEX(@TableName,' ',90)
FETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @TableName
END

CLOSE TableCursor

DEALLOCATE TableCursor

USE DatabaseName --Enter the name of the database you want to reindex

DECLARE @TableName varchar(255)

DECLARE TableCursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_type = 'base table'

OPEN TableCursor

FETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @TableName
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
ALTER INDEX ON schema.table REBUILD/REORGANIZE
FETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @TableName
END

CLOSE TableCursor

DEALLOCATE TableCursor

Background

Call me a control freak, but I like to see all the shared volumes on my Mac. I could open Terminal and cd to the Volumes folder, or I could use Finder and Go -> Go to Folder to see everything that OS X has mounted in my Volumes folder. But thats kind of a pain.

Solution

After a little bit of digging around, I found out about SetFile. SetFile is a command line utility that allows you to set the file attributes on files in an HFS+ directory. After figuring out the parameters for it, I came up with this little ditty to make the Volumes folder show up under "Macintosh HD." Run this in Terminal:

sudo SetFile -a v /Volumes

With this command, you are setting the visibility attribute on the Volumes folder to visible. To reverse the process, change -a v to -a V. Now open up "Macintosh HD" and you should now see all the volumes mounted on your Mac!