All posts by Julie

Yes – us geeks can help!

Asia

From Bali, Aceh Aid Bucket Brigade blog details the type of  skills that can be used on site:

Indonesian Language (essential)
Medical
Nursing
First Aid (wilderness/disaster first aid, not pre-hospital first aid, these people won’t get to hospitals)
Rescue and Evacuation
Emergency Sanitation (as in refugee camps, devastated/recovering villages)
Water Purification / Clean Water Systems

Also, they can use some technical help too

We are encountering some “desk work” that take up time we could be using to get medical supplies on planes, get relief workers into the field, coordinate with NGOs, etc. Things that don’t need to be done here. I mean work that could be “outsourced” to “virtual volunteers” (you?), such as updating our distribution list, and fixing it, making a database compiled from forms filled out by people applying as volunteers, maintaining specific lists, solving software problems by IM and email . . . .

We are doing lots of very important things here, that not many people in the world can do . . . in a language that most of you reading this will never need to learn to speak . . . so I think our time is crucial here on the ground in Indonesia . . .



http://www.redcross.org

Money is probably the best way to help

Asia

Unless you have some special skills, the best thing we can do is send money to the organizations who know what to do and know how to do it. So that is good inspiration for me to keep working and send what $ I can. I am sending my money through the Red Cross, though there are many other aid organizations as well. It’s a crappy feeling to realize that my skills aren’t very useful when they could really count.



http://www.redcross.org

Why Batch Update was changed from earlier Whidbey bits

ADO.NET 2

I mentioned in a previous post that the Batch updating process was changed with the current (November) bits of Whidbey to overcome a limitation in SQL Server – which is that you cannot have more than 2100 parameters in one query.

In response to a discussion in the newsgroups (ADO.NET 2.0 Batch Update), below is a screenshot from SQL Profiler with the earlier bits when I had set UpdateBatchSize=3.

It bunched together 3 queries into one big query. With 15 parameters per query,  SQL Server was receiving 46 parameters.(the 45 parameters + the actual query string which was stuffed in to @P1).

In this case, I would be hitting the limit if I tried to send more than 140 rows.

In the new bits, if you watch the profiler, you will see one row being updated per query. So  ADO.NET is now sending a group of individual queries in each batch, rather than one big huge query. I have sent batches of 10,000 rows at a time.

Example from Beta 1 October CTP – no longer true for future releases of .NET 2.0

Posted from BLInk!