The Wacky World of Chris Knight

This week Amazon released their much anticipated competitor to the iTunes music store. Downloads are in MP3, and do not include DRM; though I bet they include fingerprinting of the purchaser…

Amazon’s prices for popular songs are ten cents less than iTunes, which I guess is cause for celebration?

The Amazon website though, is particularly suited for demonstrating just how broken the ‘flat rate’ model pioneered by the iTunes store is when compared to ‘real-world’ items. For example, visit the following page and note the price of the CD, and the price of the MP3 download. $7 for the CD, and $22 for the MP3 download. I may be an instant gratification kind of person, but for these prices I’ll buy a few CDs off of Amazon and spend and evening ripping to MP3 rather than pay 3x the price to let Amazon do it for me.

Amazon.com: Hypnotic State: An Ultimate Electronic Dance Compilation: Music: Various Artists

-Chris

A few weeks ago this was an ugly place. All I could find the energy to write about was painful introspection as I re-evaluated where I was in the Universe, how I got there, and what I was going to have to do if I decided I wanted to move to a different Spiral Arm of the Milky Way. Introspection is a messy process, and at least one of my friends thinks I’m crazy for being public about it. He may be right. I may be crazy. I might just be living an 80’s Billy Joel song.

So, after all that messy introspection, which has been taken off-line now that the rough spots are for the most part passed, I felt like I should let my friends know how I’m doing.

• I’ve abandoned Polyamory as a relationship style. It wasn’t fulfilling my particular relationship needs.
• I am going back to by birth name: Christopher Lee O’Halloran
• Mel and I are back together, better than ever before; and are in fact engaged to be married on January 12th.

I am sure I am leaving a few things out, but I have been putting this off long enough, and I just want to get something posted. For more information about Mel & I’s engagement, visit http://www.hausboheme.org/

-Chris

One of my clients uses MS SQL Server 2000 Enterprise, and a few nights ago we migrated their existing databases to a newly built DB server. There were the usual gotchas that you can’t test for unless you have a duplicate of your production environment, but what can you do when you don’t have an unlimited budget?

There was an unexpected gotcha that eventually brought a sneer to my lips, and once again convinced me that I’ll take my on-the-job experiences over a MicroSoft Certification any day of the week.

I discovered, when I went to change the schedule on a backup procedure, that MS SQL Server’s Enterprise Manager won’t let you change a SQL Server Agent job if it was created on a different database server. Which means, it freezes you out of changing jobs migrated to a new server as well. (It will continue to run the Server Agent jobs… Go figure.) The specific error it gives is:

Error 14274: Cannot add, update, or delete a job (or its steps or schedules) that originated from an MSX server. The job was not saved.

A quick search with Google yields the official Microsoft support page for this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281642

It’s not a bad article, per se. It explains the cause, and it gives a fix; but, in typical Microsoft style the fix is overly complicated:

WORKAROUND
The best way to handle this problem after the rename process is to follow these steps:
1. Rename the server back to the original name.
2. Script out all of the jobs and then delete them.
3. Rename the server to the new name.
4. Add back the jobs by running the script generated from step 2.
For additional information, see the “Multiserver Administration” article in SQL Server Books Online.

Personally, the person who wrote “best way to handle this problem” doesn’t understand MS SQL server, and has very little understanding of how the system works.

Delete and re-create jobs? This is the best they could come up with?

Here is my solution, free of charge:

SOLUTION
The best way to handle this problem after the rename process is to follow these steps:
1) From Query Analyzer, logged in as ’sa’ or ‘administrator’, issue this command:
UPDATE msdb..sysjobs SET originating_server=’[NEW NAME]‘

You tell me. Which solution is more elegant?

-Chris