maintenance

Reorganise index vs Rebuild Index in Sql Server Maintenance plan

In the SSW rules to better SQL Server Database there is an example of a full database maintenance plan: SSW. In the example they run both a Reorganize Index and then a Rebuild Index and then Update Statistics. Is there any point to this? I thought Reorganize Index was a fast but less effective version of Rebuild Index? and that an index ...

How do you update your web application on the server?

I am aware of Capistrano but it is a bit too heavyweight for me. Personally I set up two Mercurial repositories, one on the production server and another on my local dev machine. Regularly, when a new feature is ready, I push changes from repository on my local machine to repository on the server, then update on the server. This is prett...

What is the Best Practice to Kick-off Maintenance Process on ASP.NET

Given an ASP.NET application, I need to run a maintenance process on a regular basis (daily, hourly, etc.). What's the best way to accomplish this without relying on an external process like a scheduled task on the server (assume I don't have access to the server - shared hosting environment). ...

How do I delete old files from a directory while keeping the most recent ones on Windows

Hello, I want to run a scheduled windows task that deletes that deletes all files from a directory that are older than 2 weeks. The reason is that these are IIS and Tomcat logs that fill up my server, but I want to keep the most recent logs in case I need to investigate a problem. Does any one know an easy way to do this? Cheers Nig...

Do you know a service like uservoice.com for bug reports?

Is there a service, similar to uservoice.com for bug reports? It should very easy to use for normal, non-techie users be free be easily maintainable ...

What development documentation do you find useful

I find that for most software projects, documentation is often oriented towards the process of development the software, rather than supporting and maintaining it. This is particularly true when using agile methodologies, which emphasize minimalistic documentation. The issue with development-oriented documentation is that it tends to be...

Disable (Politely) a website when the sql server is offline

I work at a college and have been developing an ASP.NET site with many, many reports about students, attendance stats... The basis for the data is a ms sql server db which is the back end to our student management system. This has a regular maintenance period on thursday mornings for an unknow length of time (dependent on what has to be ...

Automated Apache Server Maintenance Page

I have a website running on a Linux/Apache/Tomcat stack that needs to be automatically taken offline every few months for server maintenance, which will last an arbitrary amount of time. What are some options for getting Apache to put up and take down a "server maintenance" page? I need to be able to control this via shell script. (The ...

Visual Studio setup problem - 'A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.'

Hi All, I've had a serious issue with my Visual Studio 2008 setup. I receive the ever-so-useful error 'A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.' whenever I try to uninstall, reinstall or repair Visual Studio 2008 (team system version). If I can't resolve this issue I have no choice but to compl...

Best Tools for Software Maintenance Engineering

Yes, the dreaded 'M' word. You've got a workstation, source control and half a million lines of source code that you didn't write. The documentation was out of date the moment that it was approved and published. The original developers are LTAO, at the next project/startup/loony bin and not answering email. What are you going to do? ...

Sample sql script to zip and transfer database backup file

I was looking for a sample sql script to zip my database backup file (.bak) and transfer to a remote location. Please share if you have it with you. ...

What are some good strategies to allow deployed applications to be hotfixable?

In an ideal world, our development processes would be perfect, resulting in regular releases that were so thoroughly tested that it would never be necessary to "hotfix" a running application. But, unfortunately, we live in the real world, and sometimes bugs slip past us and don't rear their ugly heads until we're already busy coding awa...

How can I copy data records between two instances of an SQLServer database

I need to copy some records from our SQLServer 2005 test server to our live server. It's a flat lookup table, so no foreign keys or other referential integrity to worry about. I could key-in the records again on the live server, but this is tiresome. I could export the test server records and table data in its entirety into an SQL scr...

Writing maintainable code

What is the single most important factor for writing maintainable code (language independent)? ...

ResultSet: Retrieving column values by index versus retrieving by label

When using JDBC, I often come across constructs like ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery(); while (rs.next()) { int id = rs.getInt(1); // Some other actions } I asked myself (and authors of code too) why not to use labels for retrieving column values: int id = rs.getInt("CUSTOMER_ID"); The best explanation I've heard is some...

Use Compiler/Linker for C++ Code Clean-up

I'm using VS2008 for a C++ project. The code is quite old and has passed through many hands. There are several classes hierarchies, functions, enums and so on which are no longer being used. Is there a way to get the compiler/linker to list out identifiers which have been declared or defined but are not being referred to anywhere? ...

How to keep business support team motivated?

In the course of my career I've noticed that developers working on new functionality are, as a rule, more cheerful than these assigned to troubleshooting and fixing bugs. Good tips on keeping business support a happy? Organising business support in the way that team's morale isn’t hurt? ...

SQL Server xp_delete_file not deleting files

I'm trying to write some SQL that will delete files of type '.7z' that are older than 7 days. Here's what I've got that's not working: DECLARE @DateString CHAR(8) SET @DateString = CONVERT(CHAR(8), DATEADD(d, -7, GETDATE()), 1) EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0, N'e:\Database Backups',N'7z', @DateString, 1 I've ...

Maintenance teams vs. not-so-focused development teams

My organization is doing a lot of new development using Scrum, while maintaining a lot of old code. While we try to keep each development team focused on the task at hand, it is difficult because many team members "own" a piece of historic code that needs to be maintained. Some organizations solve this problem with a separate maintenanc...

SVN: Dealing with "dead" files.

I have an SVN repository. Over time, as I edit, modify, change, etc, some files are made redundant/unwanted. What's the best practice: to delete the files from SVN, or just to zero the files out? Or is there a third option that I'm missing? Thanks. ...