Vadivel's blog

During my days as an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), I used to mentor few juniors from the community. One of them used to be very low on confidence and fear of failure was hurting him more than anything. Recently while cleaning up my mailbox found few of the old emails which I have sent him - cleaned it up a bit and just compiled all those into this  article .

Over the past two years, I acquired many life lessons from cycling. However, after careful thought, I have decided to share the most significant life lessons I have learned in this article

In continuation to my earlier post Finding Missing Children in India I have been looking out for more ways by which we can help track and find a missing child. In that process came to know from my friend about comebackhome.org On the first look it definitely sounded like a great idea. The concept of this plugin is by just adding one single line of code in all websites we can get the entire internet search for the missing children. When the visitor click on the banner it will show the missing children in their geographical region. This plugin is integrated with multiple missing persons databases including Interpol , NCMEC  (The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children) and NAMUS (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System). That said, if we know of any other countries authentic databases the code can be integrated with that too. If a user of a website navigates to a page that does not exist, either because the user has mistyped an URL or trying to open an ...

Recently I come across at least one missing child information shared by my contacts in social media every week. The thought of what might their near and dear one's be going through in those period until they find the child is very disturbing. How on earth somebody is able to kidnap a child? Has money become so important in life that we lost all our moral values? Few days back came to know that my cousins friends son was missing. I don't know for some reason it has been so disturbing that i haven't come out of that yet. During that period, came across couple of sites relating to this and I believe those weren't well advertised among the public. So thought I would do my share by writing a blog post and spreading the word around.   These where important websites launched by government of India (Ministry of Women's and Child development) where one can register the details about the missing child. Since its government of India initiative hoping required focus w...

Follow this link to check out my first Microsoft Sway about VS.NET 2015 CTP download and installation

After completing 200 BRM on June 21st 2013 (ECR Classic 200 BRM) was enjoying the success for too long that I didn't practice for quiet sometime. Even registered for 400 BRM for July but dropped out on last minute as I wasn't feeling well. During that period Kandappa Sir posted in Madras Randonneurs about a crash course he is willing to take for folks who are interested in attempting 200 / 300 BRM. Didn't think twice before requesting him to consider me as well and from then on no looking back.  Took the practice rides seriously and followed it religiously.  Me and my worries! Couple of things I was worried about were: I have never rode during night time on highway and was little worried on whether my headlight would be powerful enough to show me the way.  Never during a ride I had ate anything apart from energy bar, tender coconut, Gatorade or Juices. But for a 20 hours ride one can't survive like that alone. To overcome this fear I decided to face it and...

Since lately I have been posting my cycling adventures in my Facebook account many of my friends have been asking suggestions on "What types of cycle should I buy?", "Tell me the best Brand of cycle to buy" etc., Though I am not an expert on this yet thought of sharing what I understood till now and leave for the experts to comment and help me correct any content which they feel might be misleading for the readers. My Top 4 Learning as of now 1. DON'T just go by Brand 2. Fix your Budget - Because there are bikes from few thousands to 2+ Lakhs :) 3. Be clear on what sort of terrain you plan to ride / Major purpose of this investment 4. Test as many cycles, brands as possible and see which one YOU are comfortable with. Majorly these are the 3 types of bikes I tested: Road Bikes, Mountain Bikes (MTB) and Hybrid Bikes. I had always loved the Brand Cannondale and Bianchi a lot. So I had made up my mind to buy only one of these brands. But after t...

During March 2014, after completing my first TCC 100 Kms ride in less than 4 hrs 30 mins decided that I should attempt BRM 200 in June.  Preparation: I wasn't having any friends who are into cycling at that time so wasn't too sure on what sort of practice is needed for this. I am used to cycling all alone and my only group event was TCC 100 Kms ride till now. So all I did was as much as possible daily 1 hour (20 to 25 kms) of cycling and over the weekend i extended it to 2 to 3 hours. I made sure to take a rest day after every 2 days of ride. Used to carry two bottles one filled with water and another one filled with Gatorade. As a backup will also carry two more Gatorade bottles in my backpack along with 4 energy bars. Reason being I want to get used to that drink and energy bar which I plan to use on the event day as well. Things to carry on a 200 BRM: This is in no way an exhaustive list I am just documenting what I carried and found it useful. Hope it w...

Most of the Developers / DBAs I have worked with are maintaining their utility scripts in file system. When ever a script is needed they browse through that folder via SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and open it.  I have personally found this method little tedious and not so productive way of doing things. I always prefer these two methods instead: Creating an Utility database in the server and having all the required scripts in it The other way is to organize our utility script with the help of SSMS Template explorer Maintaining Utility DB method is self-explanatory and so in this post we would concentrate on the way to make use of Template Explorer for organizing our scripts. Let's get started. To open template explorer  from SSMS  follow either of the methods: Option 1: Click View >> Template Explorer Option 2: Press Control + ALT + T We would see how to utilize template explorer to organize our utility scripts and how it helps us in...

BIGINT upper limit is 2^63-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807). For complete reference check out this MSDN article Recently I was asked when we use INT data type and it reaches its limit what do we do? The following is the error message we would see when it reaches its upper limit. Arithmetic overflow error converting IDENTITY to data type int. Arithmetic overflow occurred. Though there are multiple solutions, one of the option for us is to change the datatype to BIGINT. The person who asked me wasn't satisfied with this answer. He was worried is this a permanent solution? Won't BIGINT also overflow / reach its limits sooner or later? Obviously BIGINT would also reach its limit but it would take really LOTS of years + millions of transactions per second for it. Actually I wouldn't bother about it at all for the reasons explained below. Let's take few examples and see how many years will it take for BIGINT to reach its upper limit in a table: (A) Considering o...

While migrating your application from one version of SQL Server to another have you ever wondered how to identify the deprecated features in the new version? Manually going through hundreds of scripts is going to be tedious and time consuming. I am a lazy coder myself and would be interested only in an automated solution :) Until SQL Server 2005 we had only one way to identify it that is by making use of SQL Server Profiler . From SQL Server 2008 onwards we can make use of Extended Events as well. In this post lets see how to make use of SQL Server Profiler to identify the deprecated SQL Server code. Step 1: Open a SQL Server Instance and find out the session ID by executing the following script. This would come handy in SQL Profiler to filter out only information coming from this session. SELECT @@SPID Step 2: Open your SQL Server Profiler. Click on "Event Selections" tab and choose "Deprecation" event. Deprecation Announcement: Occurs...

Generally having a clustered index on a UniqueIdentifier column is going to be costly. Even if we add some 5000 or 10000 records in the table the fragmentation level would be surely around 95+ % which means we have to very frequently REORGANIZE or REBUILD that index. So always i would suggest lets double check and be very sure that we need a GUID column and not an INT or BIGINT column. Fragmentation Level would be too heavy Lets create a sample to see how data is getting fragmented for different datatypes. ----------------------------------------------------- --Demo Table Creation Scripts ----------------------------------------------------- --Table with UniqueIdentifier as Clusetered Index CREATE TABLE dbo.TblUID ( Sno Uniqueidentifier NOT NULL DEFAULT NEWID (), FirstName VARCHAR (100) NOT NULL, DOB DATETIME NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT pk_tblUid PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (sno asc ) ); --Table with UniqueIdentifier as Clusetered Index CREATE TABLE dbo.TblSEQUID (...

We might have heard that always we need to create our CLUSTERED index first then NONCLUSTERED indexes. Why is that? What would happen if NONCLUSTERED indexes are created first and then we create the CLUSTERED index? If you create NONCLUSTERED indexes first and then CLUSTERED index internally ALL NONCLUSTERED indexes on that table would get recreated. On a big table this might take for ever to create the CLUSTERED Index itself. Example: In the sample shown in blog post titled " Query tuning using SET STATISTICS IO and SET STATISTICS TIME " we had created couple of NONCLUSTERED indexes alone. Now, let us assume we need to create a CLUSTERED index for that table on ProductID column. First enable SET STATISTICS PROFILE ON so that we can see the profile information of the scripts we are going to execute. Then execute the below script: --Script to create CLUSTERED index on ProductID column CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [ix_productId] ON [dbo].[tblTest] ( [ProductID] ASC...