Monday, August 19, 2019

Lists of Database and BI Tools

Some utilities for SQL, let's hope you never need to use the Microsoft Kerberos Configuration Manager.

Free SQL Tools
https://www.sqlshack.com/free-sql-tools/

Searching Github for awesome always brings up some great lists.

Awesome SQL Tools
https://github.com/danhuss/awesome-sql

Awesome BI Tools
https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligence

Awesome Databases
https://github.com/agarcialeon/awesome-database

And the greatest is.... Konstantin Ktaranov's SQL Server Kit
https://github.com/ktaranov/sqlserver-kit


Thursday, June 13, 2019

Windows 10 Update Black Screen of No Return

I managed to recover from a black screen after login issue with the Windows 10 April 2018 update.  Here's some of the troubleshooting steps taken to apply a later update to fix it.

1. unplug the 3 Saitek AV8R joysticks I bought last weekend from a yard sale for $8. Didn't help! 
2. login to a black screen with cursor.
3. ctrl-alt-del and open task manager
4. start - run - control panel
5. uninstall AVG Antivirus
6. start - run - chrome
7. search for Windows 10 upgrade
8. download Windows10Upgrade9252.exe from Microsoft
9. install Windows Build version 1903 18362.175. 

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-download-and-install-windows-10-cumulative-updates-manually
https://www.drivethelife.com/windows-10/windows-10-black-screen-after-creators-update.html

After a couple hours the machine is logging in.  Still unclear about stability.  List Windows Update shows I have no updates available.  System Restore was turned off, so turned it back on and created a restore point.

Diagnosing:

From Task Manager, I ran eventvwr to get the latest events.  There was an error with AVG and and fault in Explorer.exe after the previous update which seemed to indicate the virus scanner may have blocked the update.  Start - Run - Explorer usually brings back the start menu - this time it was faulting on LiveTile.dll.  Sfc /scannow from an administrator prompt did absolutely nothing.

There are still some issues.  Checking eventvwr and selecting filter-events crashes the snapin.

The process cannot access the file 'C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Event Viewer\Views\View_0.xml' because it is being used by another process.

The link below helps to fix this.  In my case I just renamed the 2 views_*.xml files to views_*.xml.bk

https://www.ghacks.net/2019/06/12/windows-10-event-viewer-error-after-installing-kb4503293-and-kb4503327/

At least I'm only a few days behind everyone else now.