Steve Jones - Editor (9/1/2009)

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Most of the audience here are database professionals. I can assume they understand and can set up RAID systems.

I'm asking what they use at home, and...

I'm seeing some trends here:

1) Failure to do "restore testing". When you have RAID, preferably run consistency checks (if supported), but _always_ test with a "failed" (removed) drive.

2) A...

RAID 5 on an Adaptec AHA-2400A with 4 ATA drives, experienced the first issues 7 years after installation.

Slated replacement is an Areca 1231ML with 4 to 8 WD RE4 2TB...

Point of order: WinRAR is not free for production use. There is a 40 day evaluation license for...

Well, you have a couple of issues, but they all boil down to a combination of:

The size of the data (which you gave).

The bottleneck of the lowest speed portion of...

blandry (7/14/2009)

Just once, just one time I would like to see a dialog message saying "What you are about to do is really stupid. Are you sure you want...

I'll agree with most of the thread comments: trying to implement meaningful security is a people problem, and a business problem, and a discipline problem. Software problems are very...

Go to a command prompt.

perfmon

In the second group of three icons, you'll see a line graph, a bar graph, and a report. Click on the "View Report" (third) icon.

Click...

Use Perfmon on the server, look at disk statistics (Avg disk sec/read and write, disk queue lengths), CPU statistics, and memory statistics (Page Life Expectancy, among others). Check for...

In my case, middle name/initial wasn't of any real value in and of itself.

First initials are often an issue.

One step I have not yet taken is splitting up names into...

I agree that parsing is critical. On the other hand, how to parse is also very much an "it depends" question.

In general, for my only slightly imperfect matching I...

Honestly, I saw this question and refused to answer on the basis that "Unicode" has been essentially meaningless in this context for over a decade. UTF-16LE has meaning. ...

Ira, I apologize, but it appears there is at least one error in the algorithm, most likely dealing with transpositions (or I accidentally changed something important when making what I...

And, if anyone cares, here is some U.S. centric address sanitization to add to the clean_string function or set of functions. Given that addresses vary significantly country to country, please...

[Edited after an accidental early post]

First and foremost, thank you very much for writing Jaro-Winkler for T-SQL; that was an algorithm in a language I was looking for just a...