Windows 10 Black Lock Screen

For the solution, scroll down, for the story, read on.

After returning from holiday last week I had some Windows Updates to install and afterwards my lock screen was changed. Whenever I locked my computer it would show up like below.

Black Lock screen without background

 And when I then want to log in and entered the sign-in screen, the Windows spotlight background appears, as I expected in the previous screen.

Sign-in screen with background

After some searching I couldn't find this specific issue so I started looking at the Lock screen options myself.

You can open the Lock screen options by typing "lock" after pushing the start button and clicking Lock screen settings, or opening the Action Center by clicking on the notification icon and clicking All settings > Personalization > Lock screen.

Action center

Either way you should end up in this screen:

Lock screen settings

I found out that the slider on the bottom, the one that reads "Show lock screen background picture on the sign-in screen", is the culprit. Apparently this also makes the background go away at the lock screen, they could've mentioned that IMO…

TL;DR

By switching the button in the Lock screen settings to Off, the background will appear again in the lock screen.

HTH

My Reading Goal Journey

I created a page over here to keep track of all the books I read.

Before I start off this post I have to mention Adam Saxton (b | t), also known as Guy in a Cube, because this post, and the idea of setting a goal for reading was inspired by his post and video a few weeks back. If you don't know who Adam is, check out his blog on guyinacube.com or one of his video's on his Youtube channel.
In his post, Adam talks about his reading journey, and that he wants to get some regular reading done.

As I have followed business leaders and entrepreneurs, a common theme has come up. They all read regularly, and a lot!

Fast(er) reading
As Adam states in his post that he's a slow reader, I'm also not one of the fastest readers myself. I did start out with some (fast) reading techniques on lifehacking.nl earlier this year which already helped me in reading a little bit faster. The site is in Dutch, but you can probably find similar sources in English or translate it.
I'm currently at the stage of reading at 90 bpm and 2-3 stops per line. At that speed I can notice I stop the subvocalization (inner speech), which is a big part of slowing readers down. Sometimes it's hard to keep following the rules of speed reading, I'm having a hard time with regression (looking back in the text). So this reading goal is a good place to keep practicing those things and progressing even further.

My goal
For my goal to be SMART, I'm going to start out small and set my goal to 25 pages a day for 100 days, that will take me to October 11th, because I already started last Monday.




My Reading Journey
As time passes, I will keep you posted on how my journey progresses and update this post with new books I complete.

Updated on February 3rd, 2017
I created a new page called My Reading Journey where I'm keeping track of my progress.

SSIS: The Buffer Manager Failed a Memory Allocation Call

I recently made the switch to Pulse (you can read about it here), so I am working with lots of new clients lately. One of those clients was having issues with refreshing their data warehouse and SSAS cubes. The process usually takes around 30 minutes to complete, but the last week it would easily take between 5 and 12 hours. Not really the way you want it to go, right?

Problem
One of the packages in SSIS was taking ages to process so I used sp_WhoIsActive by Adam Machanic (b | t) and came to the conclusion the process had a wait type of PREEMPTIVE_OS_WAITFORSINGLEOBJECT, which can be found in sys.dm_os_wait_stats.

Jonathan Kehayias (b | t) mentions on MSDN:

For a thorough understanding of (Non-)Preemptive waits in SQL Server, Pinal Dave (b | t) has written an excellent blog post here. A little excerpt:

PREEMPTIVE: Simply put, this wait means non-cooperative. While SQL Server is executing a task, the OS interrupts it. This leads to SQL Server to involuntarily give up the execution for other higher priority tasks. This is not good for SQL Server as it is a particular external process which makes SQL Server to yield. This kind of wait can reduce the performance drastically and needs to be investigated properly.

You see the word drastically there? That's kinda what happened :)

Continuing with my investigation, I executed the source query from the package manually in SSMS and it took around 20 seconds. Executing the package in SSDT succeeded but resulted in the following two informational messages:

The buffer manager has allocated # bytes even though the memory pressure has been detected and repeated attempts to swap buffers have failed.

The buffer manager failed a memory allocation call for 65536 bytes, but was unable to swap out any buffers to relieve memory pressure. # buffers were considered and # were locked. Either not enough memory is available to the pipeline because not enough are installed, other processes were using it, or too many buffers are locked.

As the second message states there is not enough memory available, Well there should be, because I remembered there recently had been a memory increase from 16 to 32 GB on the server. But about that RAM, it is shared across the server... and between different applications... That started me thinking about the max server memory for SQL Server and the memory left for the rest of the server (OS, SSRS and SSIS!), because they're all running on the same server.

Solution
The maximum server memory can be set by editing the Server Properties (in SSMS):

or by using plain T-SQL. The beneath example sets the maximum memory to 4 GB:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO
sp_configure 'max server memory', 4096;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO

When the memory increased to 32 GB recently, the max server memory was also set from 13 to 26 GB, so the memory available to processes other then SQL Server didn't increase much. I changed the memory limit back to 20 GB to release an extra 6 GB to the rest of the apps running on the server. This way the (DTExec-)process for SSIS had enough memory to perform the tasks in-memory and the nightly process was running as normal again.

HTH

Saying Goodbye to ADA and Hello to Pulse!

As you may have noticed, I'm starting tomorrow, June 1st, at Pulse (t | web) in Venlo, that's near the border with Germany. I had a couple of days off so my last day at ADA was last week. I already said goodbye to my colleagues, had some time to clear my head and spend some extra time with the kids, which is always great!

ADA
I have to say I enjoyed my time at ADA (t | web). I really liked my colleagues and the laughs I had with them. That doesn't mean I was always doing what I really wanted or liked most. I understand that the best jobs and the nicest customers aren't always available (for me). But in the long run you have to have fun and find a challenge in what you do!

Pulse
So I decided to take a leap of faith and that's how I found Pulse, or actually they found me (ok, actually a recruiter found me). I'll be fulfilling an MS BI Consultant role there.
Pulse is an MS Gold Partner with Dynamics AX (ERP) on which they also built a BI framework. And now with the content packs of PowerBI the availability and quality of the solutions will only get better I believe.

Hopefully I will get (yes I know, I have to make time) a bit more time to blog and I'll let you know how my  choice turns out!

Nicky

How To Insert a TAB Character in OneNote

As you might know, clicking the TAB button on your keyboard results in a table in OneNote. What if you really want to insert a TAB character? Well, you need a trick for this.

• Create an Auto-correct rule that turns your chosen character sequence (e.g. "\t") into a regular TAB.
• Open Notepad++ (or the text editor of your choice) and type one TAB. Select it and copy it.
• Go to OneNote and click File | Options | Proofing | AutoCorrect Options.

• In the dialog, put your desired sequence of characters (e.g. \t into the "Replace:" field.
• Paste the TAB that you copied from Notepad++ into the "With:" field and click Add.
• Click OK 2 times to close the dialogs and you're done!

Now, any \t followed by a SPACE will be replaced by a regular TAB.

HTH

I found this answer on the MSFT community site.

The Best of PASS Summit 2015

If you haven’t been to the PASS Summit in Seattle last year (like me :(), you might want to check out the recordings of Summit 2015, as they are now available on PASStv.

Furthermore, PASS has selected the top 10 recordings (I believe based on reviews of the sessions) for you to look at over at Youtube. The links to the video’s can be found at the PASS website, go check them out!


My personal favourite is from Itzik Ben-Gan:

Have fun!

SSRS: Go Back Button in an Expression

ProblemLast week I was making a drillthrough report in SSRS for one of my clients and I had the need to make a (browser-like) Back button, to go back to the parent report for example. I know I did this before and it had something to do with history and (-1) but I couldn’t recall the syntax. So I thought I’d finally capture the solution in a blog post!

Solution
The key to the solution is the <Action> property of the <Text Box Properties>, which you’ll have to set to <Go to URL> and edit the expression with the following code:

=”javascript: history.go(-1)”

Do mind the casing here, because it’s case sensitive!