Back from the South

Over the past few weeks I've been working for a sizeable commercial bank down 'sarf'.

They’ve a computer setup that had been giving cause for concern and I was in to help them rebuild it onto new hardware.  As is usual this was interesting (in the Chinese sense!) but also rewarding, however we did get tripped up by an interesting dilemma.

The system was based in part on a an old SQL Server Cluster from which we needed the databases.  This was MSDE running on Windows 2000 Server.  The new environment is SQL 2000 running on Windows Server 2003.  The DBA's out there might know where I am going with this already… The original system was fragile and still running the original RTM version of SQL Server 2000.  The new system had to run Service Pack 3 as a minimum.  So late one day just as we went to do the restores and leave things running we hit a snag.  We could not upgrade the live system to SP3, and we could not run the new system on RTM.  We had to backup and restore the entire system including Master, MSDB, and Model databases.

So we resorted to an intermediate server - Windows Server 2000, SQL Server 2000 RTM and then restored the data, then we upgrade the server to SP3, backed it up, and restored to the new system.  A few extra hours at the end of a long day.  But a great gotcha!

The reason why - well Microsoft changed the Schema on the Master database in SQL server between RTM and SP3 and therefore the master database cannot be restored onto any machine running a different service pack.

Interesting!!

At last - proper customer service!!

My wife and I have had both savings and a mortgage with Nationwide Building Society for over 25 years. Recently we had cause to complain about their customer service and made appropriate representations.

To our surprise we received a well written, thoughtful understanding of our concerns and an apology for treating long standing customers like us badly.

It's a shame that this is such a surprise, but in the modern era it is comforting to know that there are firms out there that understand the proper meaning of customer services.

Another obvious example, and a regular shop for us is John Lewis

The further insanity of the Home Office

Some recently revealed statistics ...

• Home office to spend a few years, and many millions of pounds building 8,000 more prison places
• Home office does not know how many prisoners are actually people with mental health problems who should not be in prison; but some estimate that it runs into 10's of thousands
• Home office admits to 10,000 prisoners (out of a population of 74,000 or so) are illegal immigrants awaiting deportation.

Go figure...

R.I.P. the crazy diamond

So Syd died yesterday.  Having seen Roger and David live quite recently some of his material, notably Arnold Layne, has been in my conscious rather than subconscious.  What surprised me was the attention it got in the media - headline at the 5 o'clock news on Radio 4, front page mention of the Telegraph.  As a fan of a band or artiste it can be quite difficult to get a perspective on the relative significance/importance of your idol; so it was pleasing to see that the rest of the world thought he was important.

I just fear the speed with which EMI will 're'-release your material, or someone cover a song of yours.

So Syd, so sorry to hear you died, but you'll not be forgotten.