Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Troubltshoot Error Occurred When Installing Office 2003 SP3 Into Windows VISTA

I had been trying to install Office 2003 SP3 into my new Thinkpad T61 laptop but kept failing. When trying intallation from Windows Update, it started normally but prompted error on the half way, and never gave a detailed explanation.

I thought it might be Windows Update's fault and so download the separate installer from MS site, but the error persisted, except it gave a detailed error message somethign like 'no sufficient permission to c:\windows\system32\mapisvc.inf'.

I checked the ACL of above mentioned file and found its owner is 'TrustedIntaller', which actually stand for Windows installer service instead of a real group in VISTA. And this file was read-only to the local administrators.

So I made it owned by administrator, and grant write to administrators group. The the SP3 insallation was flying!

Here is the detailed explanation of 'TrustedInstaller'.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Some Useful VIM Commands

- Go to current directory:

:cd %:p:h

- Covert DOS line feeds to Unix line feeds, or vice versa:

:set fileformat=unix
:w

or

:set fileformat=dos
:w

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

SQL Server Agent starting problem

A lot of people(indluding me) had problem starting SQL Agent and saw the following error from Event Viewer:

SQLServerAgent could not be started (reason: Unable to connect to server '(local)'; SQLServerAgent cannot start).

There is a resolution here.

This tip is go to EM->Management->SQL Server Agent->Properties->Connection, change windows authentication to SQL server authentication(you must provide an admin account/password such as sa).

This fault took place because SQLSERVERAGENT service was by default set to started with a 'Local System Account', while local accounts were usually not added into SQL Server logins and granted system admin role.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

My Portrait


My son's work.

A T-SQL script extracting DB schema info

Sometime I need to get a full view of a MS SQL database's schema details, e.g. user table and its columns, constraints, indexes, etc. And I prefer a plain text output instead of others (let's say XML). Since MS doesn't provide this and I can't find one from web, I wrote a script to implement this on my own:-

TSQL script

The output is tab spearated and can be easily imported into Excel/Access for a better look.

In write this I found TSQL in SQL 2000 is really depressing in constrast to PL/SQL. It event doesn't provide a convenient way of exporting output into an external file, as SPOOL command of PL/SQL does, unless COM is used. More terrible is the lack of support for parameterized cursor as well as 'inline' procedures or functions.

Does SQL 2005 provide any significant enhancements?