Ant Hill Or Hornet's Nest? The Deal With Software Bugs

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Bugs.

The word causes some peoples' skin to crawl, even though by and large, most bugs are harmless. But the creepy-crawlies betray the fear we have of bugs that can destroy: hornets that sting, termites that eat through walls and floors, those crazy bullet-ants whose bite feels like a blast from a .357. In fact, the same goes for software bugs. Most are harmless, but the ones that aren't...

Software Bugs (Photo credit: FastJack)

The Importance Of Java Training For IT Professionals

Anyone in the field of IT in any industry must always be updating and learning new skills if they are to do their job effectively.  The world of technology is constantly moving and never stays still, so anyone that works within that world must also never stop the learning process to stay on top of all the latest developments.  If you fall behind in even one area, you could end up costing your company a lot of money or worse.  Most people outside of the IT industry get a little dazed and confused when it comes to trying to decipher all of the codes and formulas, but that’s why IT is an industry unto itself and IT professionals are so valuable. 

Infographics: Programming Language Evolution

In the summer of 1988 after graduation from high school I enrolled myself in a local technology school here. This is for preparing myself for my college education at that time, because I was thinking of getting a degree called Computer Science but end up taking Computer Engineering. Since i have nothing else to do that summer. In this time i have my first encountered with a programming language called COBOL or Common Business Oriented Language.

From then on when I was in college I also learned BASIC programming, D BASE and FOX BASE programming language and the last is Assembly Language. I learned HTML at worked, we have pascal and turbo c then but i missed the teacher who taught them. Anyway that was way back then now we have a lot to learn in terms of programming languages. Below is a visual guide on the evolution of programming languages.

Cloud applications

Compact Database Corruption in MS SQL Server

The concept of Database corruption still remains obscure in the minds of many database users and the very idea to deal with it would go in vain, if you do not plan out a perfect strategy at the right time. Most often, SQL database users come across compact database corruption and in majority of cases, the real culprit is not the database itself. 

The procedure described below shows how a page is read from the disk:

1. Initially, read the page from the disk. 

2. Now decrypt the page.

3. Calculate the checksum and verify with the expected value.

4. Determine whether it is the same page, which was expected as per the system pages. 

If steps ‘3’ and ‘4’ fail, you may receive the following errors on your screen: 

“Bad Checksum - idPage: %d, tyPage: %d, iPage: %d”

Or

“Page with valid ordinal not found - idPage: %d, iPage: %d”

 These errors indicate slight corruption in your database. Here are some possible reasons that could have triggered this corruption: 

·      
Improper shutting down of a device or you might have suspended a device and then resumed the operation. 

·      
If there are bugs in the underlying FAT/TFAT file system, you are very likely to face Compact file corruption. Even if you are using SD file for database storage, you may experience a similar thing. 

·       Moreover, SD cards might cause a number of problems during the Suspend/Resume cycles.  

However, it would be wrong to infer that Compact code bugs do not cause corruption. These bugs are more logical in nature. But, it would be right to say that they don't lead to physical corruptions, such as “checksum errors” or “page missing” errors. 

Indeed, compact implements a shadow paging mechanism to prevent corruption. When the Compact is performing a write operation to a file and you reboot the computer, it first writes the shadows of the original user data pages to the disk and then overwrites them with the shadows of the updated system pages. In this manner, the Compact performs a safe transaction write to the disk. Here, the changes are either completely reflected or not.    

About Author: Addision Philip is a technical writer and has written several articles on sql disaster recovery. You can see the articles from sql-server-recovery.blogspot.com.