DbComparer o_O

tl;dr: Don’t install DBComparer because it may install crapware for you.

Last week, I needed to use a SQL SERVER 2008 database compare tool for work. After searching for clues on Stackoverflow, I decided to give DBComparer a try! I am generally a very careful person on what I install and I remember having used this tool before so I gave it another go. I distinctly remember telling it to NOT install the babylon toolbar on my machine. Few days later, I installed SSMS Tool Pack.

Then, I started noticing that my machine was slowing down. All of a sudden, my search defaults were changed to babylon. I uninstalled the extensions from chrome, reset the search defaults and continued on my way. The machine continued to crawl. I had an SSD on there and opening a simple txt file would take 5 seconds when normally it would take less than 1. I immediately uninstalled SSMS Tool Pack thinking it was the culprit but even that didn’t help. I ended up having to wipe the machine. Completely. The SSD is now sitting on my desk.

Today, I asked the author of SSMS Tools Pack, Mladen Prajdic about babylon in his installer. He quickly pointed out that his tool pack does not use it. I installed his tool pack and no Babylon. And I apologized for rushing to judgement.

 

So I dug around a bit more and came up with what I found to be the culprit. I’m not sure if its intentional on DBComparer’s part but they really should take that crapware off! I am a little pissed off about this. See highlighted at the bottom on the image. [Google Cache Source of image]

To reiterate, it says “…we may show optional offers, such as the Babylon Toolbar.” Now, I did download the installer for the DbCompare site directly. Did they add it in?

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Powerball Statistics

So I am a complete nerd about data. I got lottery data from 1994 to today and decided to visualize it just to see what it shows. I was surprised by the results. Hope you can see the beauty of “random”. I will try and get more visualization at a later by including dates in the equations. Enjoy.

 

 

Update (8/28/09) – New Visuals 

 

I created a new visual to show the pattern I was observing (which is really obvious if you think about it). Number 1 is heavily skewed to the lower numbers, Number 2 is skewed to the lower numbers but not as badly and has a nice hump at the 11 mark. Number 3 is almost like the bell curve with similar distributions on both sides. Number 4 skews a little to the higher numbers. Number 5 is skewed heavily to the higher numbers. Finally the Powerball number is an even distribution but I do see some falloff at the end.

 

Now why does this make sense? Because the numbers are organized from lowest to highest in position 1 through 5 of course!

 

Stay tuned for more visualizations coming soon!

SQL Server 2008 Diagram Failure

Problem: Restored a backup of a database from SQL Server 2005 onto a local SQL Server 2008 instance. The process worked but when trying to open the diagrams group, it throws the following error:-

‘Database diagram support objects cannot be installed because this database does not have a valid owner. To..’

Solution: Run the following SQL Script on the database.

EXEC sp_dbcmptlevel 'YourDatabaseName', '90';
go
ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON DATABASE::YourDatabaseName TO "sa_or_valid_user_who_isnt_logged_in"
go
use [YourDatabaseName]
go
EXECUTE AS USER = N'dbo' REVERT
go