Designing and Building your CMDB, Part 1: From System Description To Configuration Items

This series of posts is going to be a slight departure from normal in that it won't be showing you any code. We are going through the process of designing a CMDB (that's a Configuration Management Database) to hold details for all the systems (500+) that we administer. The point of this post is to, by means of an example, show you the sort of questions you should be asking yourself when you put together a CMDB.So let's start with a description of...

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PL/SQL: Dynamically Building Your Data Archive

The purpose of this blog post is just to outline a design I put together as part of an internal project for dynamically building a data archive using rules based on the source data being fed into the system. It's far from complete but I think it highlights an interesting way of building an archive for your data when you don't know when you're doing the designing exactly what data you will be putting into it.THE PROBLEMAt the moment in order to put...

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Testing SMTP Connections Using Telnet

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SSRS: Searching The Reporting Database - Which Reports Include Subreport XXX?

I've been tasked with splitting several existing reports into two (one for one set of users, one for a different set) and while I was looking at using Linked Reports unfortunately the software program that actually does the pushing out of the reports to the end-users doesn't support Linked Reports.There also doesn't seem to be a "Dependencies" link which would allow me to see what reports are dependent on the Sub report I've been asked to change.Digging through various SQL examples that are out there there didn't seem to be anything to do exactly...

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Excel 2013: Getting Data From Parametized SQL Query (vs SQL Server)

I would have thought that dragging in data from SQL Server into Excel (both Microsoft products) would be easy - and it is if you're looking to drag in entire tables, views, etc. But if you want to do something a little more complicated with parameters it becomes a lot harder and less intuitive to get it to work.The example below shows how to get the ExecutionLogs from a SQL Server instance between two dates.  I'm going to use Excel 2013 as it's...

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EasyPush: Creating Member Groups To Control iPad Experience

This blog covers how to setup and configure Member Groups to control the distribution of content within the EasyPush iPad Application.The first step is to login to the administrative console (back-end);EasyPush: Umbraco Admin InterfaceClick on the "Members" section in the bottom left;EasyPush: Members SectionThe bit we're interested in is the node titled "Member Groups". If you click the triangle you'll see the groups already configured on the server....

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MobileIron: Removing a Deployed Application From iPads

This is a simple quick guide to how to remove an application you are already deploying via MobileIron. This is useful if you need to remove an application urgently but don't want to delete it or if, like us, you are using Active Directory groups to control deploying the application but can't wait until AD replication has caught up to remove the application.Log into MobileIron click on the APPS & CONFIGS tab, then “App Distribution”, select “iOS”...

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Lot Genealogy, Part 3: Debugging Lots and Batches

As you might have noticed I've just updated the LOT_GENEALOGY source code for this project to a new version following the discovery of a bug where the product of a batch is two different item numbers. This is a rare occurrence in our system, which is why it went undetected for so long, but it might not be in yours.Rather than dwell on that I thought I'd talk about exactly what the process was that led to us discovering the fixing the error.The first...

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