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Are you an Enterprise Manager Addict?

I sure am.  It's so much easier than remembering all the SQL syntax for editing tables, setting up indexes, etc.  I learned this -for about the 100th time in my career- over the last week when we started to get the invalid cursor state errors identified in this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;831997

We're not sure why it started, but last week any data schema changes we made through Enterprise Manager would fail and give us the above error.  We could make our changes in SQL Query Analyzer, sure, but using that philosophy I should be writing my .Net code in Notepad and compiling from the command line instead of using VS.Net.  Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.  SQL Enterprise Manager is a huge productivity boost and frees my brain from remembering the SQL syntax for indexing and other dba minutia. 

It took about 3 days of prodding before the powers-that-be relented and decided getting the hotfix was the way to go; they were understandably concerned about having a non-standard database build on the server, but I dare you to show me a truly "standard" db build except for one that comes straight from the installation disk.  Applications are installed, uninstalled, and updated over time and dlls, the registry, and other services get configured so that eventually a server is a complicated spider web of deviations from "the norm." 

It does concern me, however, that this hotfix isn't freely down-loadable from the web . . . just the sort of thing that might bite us in the butt when we're making changes to other parts of the server.  Regardless, we jumped through the hoops with Microsoft Dev Support (1-800-936-5800) and got the hotfix and resolved the issue.  Enterprise manager is back and I can dump any of that SQL admin syntax that my short term memory may still be storing!


Posted Mon, Feb 14 2005 12:46 PM by grant.killian

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Comments

Brendan Tompkins wrote re: Are you an Enterprise Manager Addict?
on Tue, Feb 15 2005 6:14 AM
I wonder if this bug appeared within VS too. It looks like it re-uses the code. Hmmm.

I ran into one of these "call only" hotfixes last week. Pain, but better than getting a buggy one now and then, I guess. Good information, thanks!
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