Jason L. Froebe - Tech tips and How Tos for Fellow Techies » TeamSybase

Looking for photos from Sybase TechWave 2008? Check out the Sybase TechWave 2008 Flickr group!

Jason L Froebe — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:24:39 +0000

Go to Sybase TechWave 2008 Flickr group

At Sybase TechWave in Vegas, I demonstrate the “Tim Tam Slam”

Jason L Froebe — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:06:17 +0000

Jason L. Froebe, TeamSybase, ISUG Board Member, and MyDatabases magazine publisher, demonstrates the Tim Tam Slam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_tam_slam

Sybase TechWave 2008: Karaoke!

Jason L Froebe — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:04:02 +0000

Please comment on the singers’ names please

YMCA

Living on a Prayer

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (part 1)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (part 2)

Love Shack

??? and Christine Weber

Mack the Knife

Thunder Road

Eric Van Patten and Millard F. Brown III

Copacabana

Nina Hunter

Material Girl

(left to right) Christine Weber, Katherine Soong, and Nina Hunter. A surprise appearance by Phil Bowermaster!

Come Together

Phil Bowermaster

Letting a Troll disrupt your day.. Don’t feed the troll!

Jason L Froebe — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:05:24 +0000

Over on the sybase-l mailing list, I let a troll cloud my good sense for a few minutes. As an ISUG board member and a member of TeamSybase and as an adult, I must not allow myself to be baited so. Please forgive me for losing my cool.

All in all, I’ve had a better weekend than Jeff Simmermon over at andiamnotlying.com – pouring espresso on ice is a bad thing according to some coffee shops. *shakes head*

Knowing the internals of Sybase ASE not always helpful

Jason L Froebe — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:13:32 +0000

There are many former Sybase employees that retain the knowledge of the Sybase ASE internals. No, not the internals from the Data Internals class but the source code and design documents. While we gave up the physical materials when we left Sybase, we still retain much of it in our brains. Technically, we aren’t supposed to use that knowledge but it is very very difficult not to.

Think about this scenerio:

Corruption on a single page in a table. Sounds easy, just bcp the data out, truncate the table, bcp the data back in. Normally that is the way to fix it.

What if the system is a mission critical 24x7x365 system that might be used for international trading or even to provide medical information to medical surgeons? BCPing the data or going to backups may not be possible. If you had the information on how to fix the corrupted page by patching it (something that Sybase strongly frowns upon)?

As you can see, using the internal/proprietary information inside your head is hard to avoid. Granted, ProActive DBA allows you to patch the individual pages, but they apparently have permission to do so — or at least Sybase is looking the other way.

If you know about SybMon and know how to use it, it is nearly impossible not to use it if your Sybase ASE server is hung and you can’t log into it.

If you fix a server using an unsupported method and report it to Sybase, there is a chance that they will not look favorably on your solution. So, do you report the problem to them and your solution in the hope that they fix the problem or do you just keep it to yourself?

Harder yet, is how to explain to your boss that you can’t tell them how you fixed the problem because you’re still under a non-disclosure agreement with Sybase. You might be able to explain the situation to your boss but if he pushes for the information and you refuse, you might be out of a job. Luckily my boss is happy to have me and doesn’t push the issue.