Monday, December 5, 2011

USPS Woes

I heard recently that the USPS is facing major cutbacks. Thinking about this led me to an idea. What if the USPS provided a pay-to send email service for every postal customer in the united states. A major problem with email today is the amount of spam, and this is in part due to the extremely low cost of sending email out.

If the USPS provided a paid email service which charged the sender, a nominal fee that is cheaper to send paper mail, and at the same time more expensive then email, I think you would find a large audience that would adopt this. Since I am neither the post master general, or a politician, I'll leave all the thousands of details alone.

Is it not time for the USPS to go green?

Saturday, December 3, 2011

SSIS Packages Loading Woes

I'm doing some work on an SSIS package, and I'm also updating the database schema it uses. The package isn't loading and VS appears to be hung. It says in the status bar that is validating the package. Is this what offline mode is for?

It's been like this for 45 minutes. Software today should detect it's in this state and then give the user to skip the validation. How long does it take to drop a column on a table with 150,208,363. I guess when you have 8 indexes where the column is included as part of a covering index it can take a while.

Especially when running on virtualized machines....darn you EC2!