monline

The information_schema in MySQL 5.x gives you the opportunity to dig into the database metadata. Unfortunately it's slow like hell. I've attempted to write a query that returns all foreign keys that have no index defined on their columns. It seems that information_schema needs a lot more tuning, because my query results in the following error message:

This just the kind of help that a casual software raid (mdadm) user -like me- needs.

A nice, detailed howto. It's in the Ubuntu forums, but it does not contain anything Ubuntu specific (ie. you can use it with any distribution).

All Siebel base tables have a couple of mandatory columns, including a LAST_UPD date column that contains the date of last modification for a given record. Using this you can easily write a procedure to look for tables/records that have changed since a specific date (or in the last "n" minutes). Thus you can find out for every operation available in Siebel Tools the tables it involves. Eg. you can edit the web layout of an applet, save the changes and then query the list of tables that contain records updated in the last 1-2 minutes to see where are the layout settings stored. You can apply the same method for any operations via the user interface (like adding/modifying a new contact, an employee, etc.).

I wonder how many years have to pass for Microsoft to release a Windows that really works? XP sucked, but eventually SP2 fixed most major problems and it became a quite usable OS. My first experience with Vista resulted in a crash after a few minutes of testing (and it was the final released version). Today I installed Windows Ultimate in a virtual machine just to see how it is and the first execution of Windows Update resulted in an error (4 updates were to be installed and 1 failed ... the Hungarian language pack of course). Then Windows told me that it needed a restart and I agreed. Unfortunately the restart resulted in an error too ... allegedly Windows Update did not let the restart proceed. What an irony.

I recently upgraded our LTSP servers at the company from Jaunty to Karmic. It was just by coincidence that I noticed a few minutes ago that Ubuntu got a new notification daemon called Notify OSD in Jaunty. I have not noticed any difference in behaviour after the upgrade to Jaunty or the upgrade to Karmic. But having read about it (both good and bad opinions) rose my suspicion that our servers still use the old notification daemon. It turned out that during the upgrade to Jaunty the new notify-osd package was installed indeed (so far so good), but the old notification-daemon was still left behind and apparently if both are installed, notification-daemon is picked by Ubuntu to be used. Uninstalling the latter left only notify-osd which resulted in the appearance of the new notification bubbles. Now that I know we can choose which one to use, I'll leave it up to the users (my colleagues) to decide. If you happen to know how to set/change the order of preference in case both daemons are installed, please share your knowledge in a comment.

There's a nice Python script for the job at linuxquestions.org written by Seamus Phelan. I've tested it, found a few problems and fixed them.

The Transact SQL code below comes handy when you're digging into Siebel's tables. It will find all references to a specific record in a specific table (identified by the table's name in the @Table parameter and the rowid of the record in the @Rowid parameter) by going through all the foreign keys that are pointing to the specified table and executing a query to get the count of referring records. Since this is a Transact SQL code snippet, it suggests you're running Siebel CRM on a Microsoft SQL Server (which is not the typical case ... but occurs anyway as it did with one of the clients of my company).

It took me a few minutes to find so it might be useful for others if I share. There are indeed pre-packaged source bundles for every Eclipse release available and theoretically you should be able to compile your own eclipse build fairly easily.