Thought make a post on it since two days ago, I was there. There were about 8 wasps nests visible there (there will be more) but they do not attack as long as they are not disturbed. When we were climbing, few people started shouting and I saw wasps coming out from their nests (Zoom the picture and see green area). Immediately one person warned them, so they kept their mouth shut. We were lucky enough to escape from wasp attack. But wasps were disturbed by people yesterday, they attacked people, resulting hospitalizing more than 100 visitors including 20 children.

One thing I noticed is, there are no signs indicates about this danger. At least authorities should set some signs about this danger and visitors must be educated about it. Unfortunately, getting information from authorities at the site is very difficult.

After long time, I took my family and went on a trip; to Sigiriya, which is part of our national heritage. We spent two days there, visiting three different heretical places; Sigiriya rock, Pidurangala Temple and Dambulla Temple.

Sigiriya is a rock where a King called Kashyapa built his castle on it. This is one of 10 wonders in the world. Climbing to the top of the hill reminded me that my body really needs daily workout, however I made it. The paintings inside the castle are fully covered now only few can be seen.

Sigiriya rock	Top of the rock; part of the King's palace
Narrow path to climb up	Nests of wasps. They shouldn't be disturbed.

Pidurangala is a temple that is built before the castle. According the person I spoke there, this has been built by the king and given to monks in order to take permission and blessing from monks. Since it was dark and no electricity at the top, we were not permitted to go the top but there were enough of things excavated to watch. It is believed that more than 100 Rahath monks were there.

Buddha statue at first level	Places used by monks for meditation

Dambulla is another temple that has been built inside a rock. We had to climb up bit but not hard as Sigiriya. There are more than 100 Buddha statues inside the rock and one of the strange things inside is, a water line comes from the top. Still the technology used for it is uncovered.

Temple inside the rock
Buddha's statues inside the temple

These places are built by our ancestors showing there loyalty to the country and paying respect to the Budda. I am proud of being a Sri Lankan.

The place we stayed is Sigiriya Village that is nice place and service is provided by very nice people; very close the Sigiriya rock. The surroundings of the hotel are really beautiful and peaceful.

Does it stand for Database Consistency Checker? That's how I had interpreted it but found it was wrong. It had been an acronym for Database Consistency Checker but because of the enhancement integrated with it from SQL Server 2000 onwards, a new meaning has been given; Database Console Command. It gives more than consistency checking features. So, make sure that you refer DBCC as Database Console Command from SQL Server 2000 onwards.

This note was made regarding .NET assemblies and SSIS. It is a short, simple note that explains the way of accessing .NET assemblies in SSIS and problems we might be facing. Read this and see whether it is useful.

I made a bit lengthy note on Isolation Levels and it has been published at www.sql-server-performance.com. It explains all isolation levels in SQL Server 2005 and I have added samples as much as possible to make them clear.

Here is the direct link if you are interested: http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/dba/isolation_levels_2005_p1.aspx

We will be doing the SS SLUG August meeting tomorrow at Microsoft. The first session will be done by a new speaker, Preethiraj who is a DBA at Virtusa. He will be doing a session regarding Data Partitioning, one of most wanted. Gogula will be doing the second one, great topic, UDM more than OLAP. I will be doing a one too, introducing SQLPromt, one of great red-gate tools.

For more info, visit http://sqlserveruniverse.com.

Last week, two presentations were done for a company called Stretch Line (MAS) at Microsoft. One was regarding Reporting Services, focusing on authoring and formatting reports. Almost all data regions were covered including formatting and expressions. The second was regarding Integration Services. I showed them couple of Flow Control Transform that they found very useful for their operations. I'll be doing two more presentations for them regarding Configuration and deployment on both Reporting Services and Integration Services.

I rarely use query shortcut keys. The reason behind for that is, I have not added any new query shortcut keys :), only default keys are set. Recently there was a blog post about query shortcut keys in the SqlAdvice and it opened by eyes for using query shortcut keys. One cool setting is, you can set a part of a statement for one shortcut key. Then highlighting a word in the query editor and hitting the shortcut key will complete the statement defined in the shortcut key with the highlighted word and execute. Check this;

Open SQL Server Management Studio and open Options dialog box. Expand Environment node in the left pane and click on Keyboard. You can see default shortcut keys set for some built-in SPs. Select one of unused shortcut keys (eg. Ctrl+0) and write SELECT * FROM in the Stored Procedure column. Click OK to save the setting. Now open a new query window and write a table name (or drag a table from Object Explorer). Highlight it and hit Ctrl+0. Query window will execute a statement like SELECT * FROM {yourtable}. How easy? You can set different types of statement for other query shortcut keys. For more info, read this post.

SQL Server 2008 July CTP is now available for download. Visit here for downloading. Some sample codes have been added to codeplex; download samples from here.