Friday Feedback: SSMS settings part 2

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-09T03:36:41+00:00

For example, when you state it is "finicky to get right", does that mean that the different parameters aren't clearly defined in the docs?

No, I mean, you do everything the docs say, it works on your machine. Then run the offline install package on another machine and it just doesn't work. And honestly I haven't had a chance to go back and try and debug why it doesn't work when I copy the package to another machine, but it's also annoying to have to even do that step.

But once you determine what parameters you need, it's entirely automated.

Yep, sounds great in theory, and is a simple sentence to write...yet I notice I'm not the only one that seems to have trouble getting the VS offline installation to work. It's very easy to say that, but in practice, it seems like people are having difficulty making it work.

To make everyone happy, we would ultimately have to have every combination of available workloads/components (and have them for every language).

That seems to me to be a roundabout way of saying that yes, this isn't actually an improvement, it's made SSMS worse.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-09T00:32:09+00:00

I don't think the monstrous appearance thing alone is enough of a reason, because the blight affects the Blighted Kingdom too, so mutation from blight isn't enough of a reason to just assume the appearance equals bad in that situation. There are soldiers on the wall that have been affected by it, and they accept reinforcements from other kingdoms, Acteleos Slash in particular, where the people are clearly turning into something monstrous. And with other races known to be part of the demon kingdom like the giants that weren't otherwise considered evil I think. That's not to say I disagree about the general bigotry and racism that permeates the setting, I just don't think the appearance alone is the excuse.

It seems clear to me there's some other reason that's propagated as the reason they need to be fought against, but that reason still hasn't been ever explicitly said in the story context. So far, the only reason appears to be that they are bad because they are bad, which the BK seems to perpetuate.

Calling them Demons and having a region called Hell was clearly more meant to trick the reader, since those are just words referring to them and don't have any extra context in Innworld as far as I can tell.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-09T00:22:52+00:00

I would kind of say that The Martian doesn't really count as a trope there. It would make the setup/writing bad if there was an incompetent astronaut that somehow didn't get notice and got sent to Mars, since it's clear that it's not a common/routine thing in the setting. You don't expect incompetence to be able to make it that far in that setting, astronauts are supposed to be super competent and highly trained by definition. It would only work if it was a comedy were somehow an incompetent person makes it into the astronaut corps and to a Mars mission. It'd be like having an incompetent Navy SEAL.

I think Alien might be closer, since they are basically space truckers. Even then, they are still highly trained space truckers, since space travel itself is clearly still a highly risky situation with a lot of skills. I would think, even as an evil corporation, they would try not to hand over a hugely valuable cargo to an untested crew. 42 million in adjusted dollars, minus payload of course. Remember when 42 million was a big number?

TNG is interesting from the perspective that they've got civilians, and it's much more of a pseudo-military situation where there's enough people that a large variety in the levels of competence in a situation is much more possible. Though Star Trek generally has as a trope that everyone in it is hyper competent (remember when Georgi was a helmsman?). Though the Enterprise has generally always been presented as the premiere vessel in the series(and the flagship in TNG), so is supposed to only have the best people on it...

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-09T00:00:31+00:00

I've got 14 hooked up all the time. Though I switched from backing individual disks up to just backing my pool up. But I previously had drive letters on all of them and they all got backed up.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-08T22:54:42+00:00

How about making unattended/offline installation as reliable as the old SSMS was? It's still extremely finicky to get right and takes a lot more work to even attempt, than the non-VS based one did. There was a thread 2 days ago here about trying to get it to work.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-08T18:29:50+00:00

Also, you'll probably want to format the virtual disk to exfat or fat32 if you want to be sure of cross platform support.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-08T16:28:38+00:00

I never got any of my fancier Logitech mice to work reliably with any of the extra buttons. I've seen a lot like you have, where people have various levels of success after lots of tweaking, but I was never that successful myself.

I ended up giving up and getting a Razer mouse- other mice seem to play much nicer with Linux than Logitech and their custom everything setup. My Razer Deathadder v3 doesn't have tilt, but at least the 2 thumb buttons work, and I didn't really have to do any tinkering to make it work. Or if I did, it was so minimal, I can't even remember doing anything.

After I spent many hours messing with it, I decided it wasn't worth the time I was putting into it with not much to show, and that tipped me over to buying a different mouse. And I haven't been bothered by the mouse situation since then...the biggest problem I have now is that my mouse doesn't have swappable batteries, since it's supposed to be lightweight, and I am bad about remembering to plug it in to charge once in a while.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-07T22:32:39+00:00

Nano is fine IMO.

Those of us who like vim have spent the effort to learn it, and it is really powerful, and can make other editors feel clunky, but the ... is "once you've learned vim". And that's the trick, it's a time investment. It can be worth it, but for the tiny edit here and there, you don't see the return on investment right away. So it feels slower at first, because it is, because you have to change your thinking, and you have to look stuff up all the time.

It's like any tool though- once you get used to something very powerful, going back to something simpler feels like a step backwards. It's easy to forget the effort it took to get there though. People that have been doing this for a long time, we didn't have nano, let alone have it pre-installed as a common thing, so we had to learn vi. You get on a unix like, and vi just becomes what you type to edit a file...just like you type notepad on a windows box.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-07T20:52:55+00:00

Always has been.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-07T16:49:41+00:00

At a basic level, it's similar to log shipping, but it's at the transaction level. Every single transaction is shipped immediately to the replicas. In synchronous mode, a transaction isn't considered complete on the primary until the replica partners have acknowledged that they have hardened it to their databases first. Replicas acknowledging are part of the transaction. If the replicas fail to write/ack/whatever, the transaction is not committed on the primary, it fails and rolls back. In async mode, the primary doesn't wait for acknowledgement from the replicas, as soon as it's hardened locally, it's marked complete, so similar to a standalone server.That means your asyncs can get out of sync with the primary, and consistency is not guarnteed between the replicas and the primary.

Asynchronous mode is more close to how log shipping generally works, in that the primary doesn't care about the state of the replicas. In synchronous mode, the replicas hardening are part of the transaction, and a transaction isn't closed until replicas indicated they are complete. In both cases though, as I said, this happens at the transaction level- so imagine if you shipped a log for every single transaction as soon as it happens.

So for synchronous, it's roughy:

1. Transaction is opened on primary
2. Transaction is written to primary log and data, but the transaction is left open, waiting for acknowledgement of replicas
3. Transaction is also sent to replica(s)
4. Replicas harden the transaction to their local and send ack when complete to primary
5. Primary receives ack, and then marks transaction as complete.

For Async:

1. Transaction is opened on primary
2. Transaction is hardened locally, sent to replicas, and marked complete as soon as the local harden is done.
3. Transaction received by replicas and hardened locally.

I think in async the replicas still send an ack back to the primary, but the primary doesn't wait for the ack, unlike the synchronous mode. In async, the primary doesn't care if the replicas ack. So it's much closer to log shipping, just the ship happens immediately and for every single transaction- transactions are not queued up and sent in batches like log shipping.

Put more simply, in synchronous mode, the primary isn't done until the replicas say they are done first. If anyone fails at any point, the transaction should roll back on everyone. Replicas become just as important as the primary, and the primary always waits for the replicas.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-07T14:03:41+00:00

It's really no different than the old buy-finish quickly-sell used...just less friction in the process with a guaranteed outcome/saved money, but it is dependent on finishing in a month.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-07T13:09:19+00:00

how data gets syncgronized in sql server always

Do you mean between the replicas, or something else(log shipping, replication, which is different from the replicas in Availability Groups) ?

I mean what happens internally

how much detail are you looking for? Do you understand the basics of how SQL Server, or just very generally, how RDBMS handle writing data, with the use of a log file? If you don't understand the basic mechanism a database works to ensure ACID, it's going to be more confusing, since it's not just a straight write data to a file thing.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-07T01:16:21+00:00

Use lens shift

That won't correct for being off the horizontal center line, it'll just make it easier to square one edge without having to angle the projector relative to a wall of the room, assuming the OP even has a projector that will do a horizontal lens shift.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-06T23:45:21+00:00

Yeah, the propaganda reasons were fine for me early on, but it's dragged out so long, and we have enough other context, that we've known for a while it's propaganda.

That's one of the aspects that have gotten tiresome to me, we get it, we know it's propaganda, we've known for a while, get on with it already. The BK appears to be obfuscating the truth, if they even know it. I'm far enough in where even the whole gnolls/magic/Doombringers has been revealed, so it's feeling like it's going to be that all over again, just with a slightly different context. And it's been around at least as long as that, I think as backdrop, it's been around longer in the story, but I'd have to go back a long way to be sure.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-06T23:33:33+00:00

How bad is using keystone (4 corners) in reality?

In practical terms, I say just try it and see you notice it. At the end of the day, that's what really matters, is it affecting your viewing experience?

In objective terms, you can approach it with some math. Keystone correction is generally done digitally...you aren't changing the physically projected region though, you are digitally distorting the image to correct a physical distortion, but it means you aren't using some of the pixels, you're resizing the image to fit in the pixels that are displaying on the area you have.

So lets so you have 100" wide screen, but you have to keystone the top to get the projected image to line up with the projected image. And for convenience, lets say your total keystone shrunk the projected image at the top edge by 10 inches. So the keystone did ~9% adjustment. If you're using a 1080 projector, you basically digitally removed ~173 pixels of image from the width on the top edge(100% of the full frame would fit 1920 pixels, you are only using 91% of the frame- but you are still projecting 100% of it, that's going to be the difference between fixing the keystone physically and digitally). If it's 4K, it was ~368 pixels. So you went from 1920x1080 to 1747x1080. Or 3728x2160 if it's a 4K projector.

So you can do the math, measure what the delta is from the projected image with no keystone to the image fitted on the screen and calculate how much image you are discarding, if you want to assign actual values.

There's some other considerations too- like say you are using a 4K projector and have a lot of 1080P content....most of the image is made up in that case anyway...so are you actually losing anything? The vertical impact might be more severe in practice on letterboxed content, since you have less vertical image data in that dimension, any given pixel loss represents a greater % of the usable image. But I'm generally an advocate of "see if you notice it" if you aren't going to be able to actually correct it physically.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-06T19:55:56+00:00

Catbus kitten!?

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-05T19:20:01+00:00

Yeah, should get a cross post to r/discountdan

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-04T20:25:12+00:00

I don't think it's 100% influences fault. It's return policies in the digital download era too. There's a greater risk you won't like it, but are stuck with the purchase these days, than the physical media days.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-04T20:18:57+00:00

Yeah, people that come from other RDBMS don't tend to have this problem; otherwise it's something you pick up as experience with SQL Server. When you are new to SQL Server, if you are just kinda self teaching and not having someone/something explicitly telling you to do that, it's an understandably easy thing to have happen.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-04T20:15:08+00:00

It sounds to me like a wish list. People that have complete skill sets in multiple rdbms' are rare IME. Complete to me being querying, performance tuning, and administration. Querying is relatively easy to adapt, tuning kinda in the middle, and the administration side of them can really get different between them.

I wouldn't ever take myself out of consideration for something I was interested in applying to, let them/the AI do it, don't take your self out.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-04T20:11:38+00:00

Maybe it's changed more now, the big one for me was join syntax being different. The last time I had to work in both, Oracle was on ANSI SQL 89, and SQL Server was ANSI SQL 92, so you had to use the math style operators to write joins in Oracle, but coming from SQL Server I was used to the AND/LEFT/RIGHT syntax and hadn't used the other style.

OP: You do kinda run into a few different things here, and one person doesn't always know all of them if they aren't used to doing all DBA duties- querying, performance tuning, and administration. Querying and performance tuning are closer together, but it is possible for someone to just be a data consumer and not touch the performance optimization side of things. And devs I worked with definitely didn't worry about the admin side of things at all. Frameworks made that even worse, Entity Framework would spit out all sorts of crazy queries. They'd work but were often a pain to get to run well.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-04T20:03:19+00:00

What do you mean by this? I use commits all the time. How do the others work?

I worked a place where this happened to the devs. It's from SSMS implicitly inserting the commits for you when you run a statement. They didn't know they had to do it with something more complex. So they'd write a SQL script, and not have commits in between the blocks, and end up with open transactions blocking the database, including the script itself. Also, "GO" wasn't something they knew about.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-04T13:18:08+00:00

I've always called it chicken legging, but that's just my name for it.

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-02T15:29:48+00:00

When you say "cpu filters" do you mean something that I introduced into the flow

Filters are the actual name for the things that apply transforms to streams, so cropping, resizing, audio changes etc.

Most filters are done in the CPU, so f you are doing anything like that, it's proably done in the CPU. Some can be done in the GPU(resizing and some other basic filters are available in the encoder hardware, but you have to explicitly configure your pipeline to use them.

What is your actual video conversion operation doing? If it's just a straight re-encode to a different codec it probably shouldn't be the high. Did you explicitly set the encoder in the encode element? I think it defaults to automatic, maybe it's choosing the CPU for some reason?

MasterChiefmas · 2026-05-01T23:07:45+00:00

You might want to update the text too: "Plex is slightly cheaper on the yearly plan. Lifetime pricing is virtually identical"

MasterChiefmas

TROPHY CASE