AdrianSpencer

Change Requests

Ooops. I'll check the dates in future. "One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius." Iain M Banks

Why not use a Pivot Table? They are just a few mouse clicks. Assuming your table looks something like this... Name Subject Grade Name1 Maths c Name2 Maths a Name3 Maths b Name4 Maths d Name5 Maths a Name6 French a* Name7 French b Name8 French b Name9 French c Name10 French c Name11 English b Name12 English a* If you create a Pivot Table [Data > Pivot Table and Pivot Chart Report... in 2003] or [insert Tab in 2007]. Row = Subject Column = Grade Data = Count of Name (I find Admission Number more reliably unique for counting) You then get... [tried to paste it here but the format went horribly wrong]...what you want. If you use SIMS you can automate this from SIMS report. I can dig out some instructions for this if you wish. "One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius." Iain M Banks

Whilst I do backup our databases using BE, I also use sql maintaince plans to create SQL backups (.bak and .trn) to file. These are then backed up by BE as a simple file backup. Just seems safest. "One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius." Iain M Banks

We have now reached the capacity for rack space, UPS and Airco and are investigating virtualisation of as many systems as we can. We have taken advice and the consultant has been running monitoring on all servers. The results of this suggests that it is not a good idea to virtualise our SQL cluster. We do also run Sharepoint MOSS2007 databases on this cluster along with SIMS and a number other management and MIS databases. So, we will be building a new physical SQL 2008 Cluster to host these. SIMS: However, I am very interested in the comments about SIMS on Hyper-V posted here. With the high level of maintenance it requires, the fact that it has to have part of its application tier on the SQL box itself, and its requirements for file locations (more in a bit). I am looking at moving this to its own virtual server. I have found that SIMS is not particularly happy living on a cluster (not cluster aware). When upgrading I have to do registry updates to the second cluster node. I have never known failover to just work for SIMS without some intervention. My other databases failover fine. In an ideal world it is good to separate logs from datafiles. Not in SIMS. Their DBAttach utility and System Manager application (more application installations on my database server) seem to require that the log files are in the same location as the data files. So, now we move SIMS to Hyper-V. Not such a simple process as SIMS is our main MIS system and feeds data into nearly all of the others (Sharepoint, finance, transport and more) as well as into AD. Digging this lot out and re-establishing all the connection strings etc it going to be fun. SHAREPOINT It may be of interest to those using MOSS2007 that the results of our monitoring suggest that we should virtualise the two Front-end Web servers, but not the index server as disk IO is high. OTHER ROLES Out of 46 physical servers we reckon that virtualisation will have no negative (and possibly positive) impact on performance for 20 of these. NB these are not 20 server roles as we have a fair bit of clustering. Adrian "One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius." Iain M Banks

The Culture's Dataverse in Iain M Banks books! Controlled by a network of Minds (AI). They do all the thinking and working. Can it be worse than human's who run things now? Seriously, I think it is the way to go. But which of the big competitors to go with? Who is getting it right? I like the look of the amazon stuff but I think for the time being I will go for self-hosted remote application etc. See how the market settles. Adrian "One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius." Iain M Banks

Hi We've moved to Nova T6 and we have tested it 64-bit systems. It works fine. However, I have not moved production to 64-bit yet. I will wait until T6 has better reports. Until then we are still using T4 for many reports. I sympathise with Start_C on getting teachers to use the system Adrian "One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius." Iain M Banks

I greet cloud computing with enthusiasm and I beleive it will have a major role to play in schools who perhaps do not have the full range of resources and in-house skills that exist in the commercial sector. The cloud can give these schools access to the sort of computing facilities that larger institutions currently enjoy. For larger schools it will mean that we can really concentrate our resources in areas of particular interest to our organisation or where ownership is important. Other utilities can come from the cloud. Of course there are concerns and those relating to security and reliance on ISPs and external agencies have been highlighted by many of the contributors to this thread. We cannot go fully down this route until we are satisfied that these have been addressed. One other concern, which may not be big problem, is the interraction with the desktop client. I used to administer a Citrix environment (OK it is Terminal Service and not quite the same thing) and one of the biggest issues for me was with printers and the loading of printer drivers that are correctly recognised by the remote application. Saving to local and network drives was also sometimes and issue. I wonder if similar issues will occur with cloud applications. Certainly something to test. Definitely a space to watch