Neal Waterstreet

Archives for July 2013

Passed 70-452

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Yesterday, after much procrastination, I finally took the 70-452 exam. This exam is for MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer 2008 and expires at the end of the month. I wanted to go ahead and take it now to make the  2012 ( will there be 2014?) certification a little easier. The upgrade path from 2008 to 2012 is 3 exams instead of  5.

What did I use to prepare? I didn’t use anything specifically for 70-452, but I did use the materials I used for 70-448.

  • MSDN
  • MeasureUp 70-448 Practice Test
  • 70-448 Self-Paced Training Kit
  • My own experience

I couldn’t find any information on 2014 exams, so I will go ahead and start on the 2012 exams. I’d like to get those started as soon as possible.

Aereo after 1 month

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I’ve been using Aereo since it was in beta in Atlanta. Some time has passed for me to really test it out and I still like it. Recording is very simple and the menus are easy to navigate. Prior to that, I had not been able to record shows since cutting cable and was watching mostly Netflix. I forgot how much easier it makes watching what you want with a DVR. That is probably not a good thing. One concern I had was the amount of space available for recording, but my drive is not even come close to filling up so there is no problem there.

Anyway, a month in there are a few improvements that I would like to see.

  • Improve the picture quality – Some of the channels can be a little grainy. This does not happen enough to be a big problem, but it does happen enough to be noticeable. It could just be an issue with the local channels.
  • Speed up the launch time – Starting a recorded show can be painfully slow at times. The behavior is similar to Netflix, but with a longer wait. Rewinding and Fast Forwarding also experience this. I’m not sure if this is just me or not.
  • Still no app for Android.

Overall
I think Aereo is here to stay. The service is good will get better over time. I just wish more channels offered a digital subscription.

Try the statement later?

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I got an error message I’d never seen before while altering a database.

Database is in transition. Try the statement later. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 952)

Try the statement later? What does that mean? I altered a column in a test database and immediately tried to take it offline. That is when I got the error. After searching for the message I found this. One of the solutions suggested was to search sys.dm_exec_requests for an alter process on that database. Sure enough it was suspended. I killed the SPID and the database was back online pretty quickly.