Beautify Your Management Studio (2012)

 Articles, General  9 Responses »
Jun 262012
 

I recently posted my colour scheme for Management Studio 2005/2008, and have just completed porting it to Management Studio 2012.

image

As before, it’s based on a combination of Solarized and Son of Obsidian.  The most visible change from the 2008 version is the highlighting – Visual Studio 2010 uses transparency for highlighting text, which looks rather bad when  combined with my previous dark yellow colour. I’ve set it to black for now, which doesn’t look too bad. This plugin will apparently fix the transparency, but I haven’t tried as yet.

You can download the settings file from here (rename to remove the .txt extension from the file), and use the Tools –> Import and Export Settings menu in Management Studio. This also allows you to take a backup of your current settings, or revert back to defaults.

If you enjoy the settings, or have any suggestions, please let me know! I’m still using SSMS 2008 as my main IDE, so this version isn’t quite as well tested yet.

If you’re not a fan, or you’d like to enjoy other colour schemes for Visual Studio 2010, check out studiostyles (although many of the styles won’t be specifically set up for the SQL* elements in Fonts and Colors, so you may have to do some editing).

How long will this rollback take?

 General, QuickTip  No Responses »
Jun 072012
 

It’s one of those simple things that you’re sure you should know, but are pleasantly surprised when you discover it.

The scenario was that a vendor-supplied batched audit history deletion job was running, and the transaction log was growing… and growing… The batching appears to work well from Management Studio, but not so well from the application – my guess is that the application is creating an outer transaction, preventing the inner transactions in the batch process from actually committing.

After an hour of running, the job failed, running out of log space with a 60 GB transaction log (no major issue – it was a test server), and started to rollback.

How long will this rollback take? In theory, it should be less than the hour we’d already spent – we don’t have to grow the log, and we don’t have to run through the batching process repeatedly to determine which rows to delete.

The solution? The KILL command can retrieve the status of the rollback. Normally you’d use this to see how long a killed process will take to rollback, but it will work fine for out-of-space rollbacks too.

KILL 101 WITH STATUSONLY;

With the result being:

spid 101: Transaction rollback in progress. Estimated rollback 
completion: 65% Estimated time left: 933 seconds.

Note that running the command repeatedly won’t make the rollback happen any faster, but it’s not likely to slow it down any either.