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Still-life bride floating in pond
That’s not the title, I made that up.
The photo is credited to Christian Geisnaes and it is associated with the film Melancholia by Lars von Trier. The actor is Kirsten Dunst.
This is a YouTube clip of the overture. It goes about 8 minutes and needs to be watched full screen with the volume up. (The music is by Wagner, read about it here)
Age before beauty: Success and the older developer
This article appeared in the MSDN magazine, Feb 2017
Great photo taken from space
I came across this photo on one of the news websites (photo credited to: Thomas Pesquet/European Space Agency/NASA via The New York Times)
It came with the caption, Berlin at the bottom and Belgium at the top, with the aurora borealis at right, in a picture by Pesquet.
Someone pulled a comment from Pesquet’s facebook page:
I hope the Belgians will stop lightening up their roads in this way, if they don’t want the extraterrestrials to come and land there…But seriously these pictures are a denunciation of wastefulness.
I wonder…. Is it correct that Belgium has nuclear reactors? I’m not sure if they can turn them down at night, so running a lot of street lights might be the thing to do.
SQL server defaults and the CXPACKET wait
I decided to write about this issue partly as an execise in creating a WordPress blog item. I was doing some random reading and came across an article discussing SQL server default settings. The particular setting that caught my interest was Cost Threshold for Parallelism.
The default is 5, that is, 5 seconds. Here is what the article I referred to has to say about 5:
This is the Query Cost where SQL Server Engine will start using parallel plans for your query. It is the estimated elapsed time in seconds for your query to run if it’ll run serially or use only one CPU. Five seconds is pretty low and only applicable to a totally OLTP application – which is never the case. This will likely cause even simple queries to run in parallel, and you are bound to have even more complex queries in your application. Add that to the fact that you likely have multiple concurrent transactions. You’d rather have that simple query running serial than have it use all of your CPUs causing more transactions to wait for CPU resources.
And this is how you end up with the CXPACKET wait events.