Refreshing Intellisense in SQL Management Studio 2008

If you're like me, you create and drop a lot of tables while developing, and you may be getting annoyed with SQL Server Management Studio because it fills in the names of old tables while you're typing unless you hit Escape. Turns out that refreshing the Intellisense cache is as easy as

Ctrl-Shift-R

If your DATE comes through pyodbc as a unicode, it's probably the driver

File this under "should have been obvious." I had a test script break today because I was trying to do date math on an object that wound up being a unicode instead of a date. I had gotten the variable value from a pyodbc query against a SQL 2008 database table with a DATE column. I knew that DATETIME columns came in as datetime.datetime objects, but the DATE column came in as a unicode, which seemed strange.

Turns out it's the ODBC driver. Demo:

In [78]: cnxn = pyodbc.connect("DSN=local;")

In [79]: crsr = cnxn.execute("select cast('2012-01-01' as date) as bar")

In [80]: r = crsr.fetchone()

In [81]: type(r.bar)
Out[81]: unicode

Then, when switching to SQLNCLI10:

In [96]: cnxn = pyodbc.connect("Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=localhost;Trusted_Connection=Yes;")

In [97]: crsr = cnxn.execute("select cast('2012-01-01' as date) as bar")

In [98]: r = crsr.fetchone()

In [99]: type(r.bar)
Out[99]: datetime.date

Faster, thinner, lighter

It's almost time to retire my trusty old Dell E4300. The warranty just expired, which means that if Dell has optimized their average component MTBF vs warranty span correctly, the laptop will implode shortly. I replaced the original hard drive with a 2nd-gen Sandforce SSD a year ago, and it's made a big difference, but I'm ready for a little more speed. And, with the advent of the "Ultrabook" form factor, for even less weight and size. I've decided I want one.

At CES this year, there were plenty of ultrabooks on display - Engadget's roundup has a few, more on Anandtech). And most of them seemed to get at least some part of the formula right, but I don't think any of them have quite grabbed me yet. Maybe I'm being picky, but I've decided that my top priorities are:

- 1600 x 900 resolution

- Thunderbolt port (for docking)

- decent battery life (5 hrs+)

- light weight

I'm sick of my current 1280 x 800 screen - the drop in my productivity from 2 big 1920 x 1080 screens down to the tiny laptop screen is painfully apparent. 1366 x 768 is arguably worse, since I really need those vertical lines of resolution. And although I move around a lot with a laptop, which is why I want a good battery and light weight, I also use it as my primary workstation, so I need to be able to dock it and use my big monitors. In fact, a laptop that would support 3 screens instead of 2 like my current Dell would be preferable. Few of the ultrabooks seem to have this capability, but at least a Thunderbolt port would make it theoretically possible.

Other requirements are pretty normal. The number of USB ports matters, but not hugely, since most peripherals I use at home while connected to a dock. I do use my SD card reader pretty often, so it would be nice to keep that. A decent keyboard, preferably backlit, would be useful.

Requirements in mind, I took a look at the current crop of ultrabooks just demoed at CES, and... was totally disappointed. Nothing had all the features I wanted. The closest ones were:

Samsung Series 9

- no Thunderbolt but both HDMI and DisplayPort connections

- 1600 x 900 resolution (on what I hear is a great screen)

- light weight (2.5 lbs)

Sony Vaio Z

- Thunderbolt, sorta, via a proprietary connector as usual (thanks a lot, Sony)

- 1600 x 900

- light weight

- ungodly price ($1900+)

Here's my spreadsheet comparing the current crop of ultrabooks and their cousins using my completely biased and proprietary scoring system. It's a definite work in progress and the scoring may change without warning. If something comes along that scores above a 3, I'll probably buy it, but right now, none of these are worth the money.

More fun with SSIS type conversions

Just finished painfully debugging a strange SSIS issue about which I could find no documentation anywhere on the web, so I'm noting it here.

I had changed a type within a large unwieldy data flow from DT_R4 (float) to DT_R8 (double), since the smaller data type was causing some weirdness around the least significant figures on some option prices. This seemed to work in testing, but I got a cryptic error about a conditional operation failing during a derived column transformation when I deployed it to Production. I opened the package, added an error redirection for the component and a data viewer, and sure enough, it was failing on a transformation that utilized some of the columns I had modified.

I couldn't find any reason why the conditional would fail, since it was faithfully spitting out BOOLs, but the resulting transformation split the float into Integer and Decimal by casting the value into a WSTR, 20 and then finding the decimal point. After trying a dozen other things, I tried adjusting the size of the WSTR cast to a WSTR, 40. That worked.

Note that the values that were failing would not even come close to 40 characters (ex: 110.68), but apparently the possibility of running into an overflow breaks something in the SSIS runtime.

So, a word to the wise: if casting from float (DT_R4 or DT_R8) to Unicode string (WSTR), make sure you leave enough room to cast any possible value.