I wanted to do some database design work this weekend on my secondary laptop. In order to this, I needed to install SQL Server 2008. My secondary laptop is a Windows 7 machine. I think to myself, this will be pretty easy, download the bits from MSDN, use the Virtual CDRom Utility from Microsoft to mount the iso and away we go. Imagine my surprise to learn that the great little iso mounting utility that worked so well on XP does not work on Windows 7. This started my search for a solution that was light weight and of course free.

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I had an interesting issue today. I was working with a product that needed select privileges to the sys tables and have ownership of the table it was going to use on a SQL 2005 Server. After trying various combination of permission settings. I came across the following two commands that did the trick for me.

Grant SELECT privileges to tables:

SELECT 'GRANT SELECT ON ' + TABLE_NAME + ' TO [user]' FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Tables;

Change table ownership:

ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON [database].[table] TO [user];

Everything inside the [ ] are the portions that I had to change for my specific set up.

So if you ever need to grant select privileges tables or grant ownership to a table in SQL 2005, I hope this helps out.
Dave

It is very straight forward to copy the contents of one directory or folder to another folder using the copy command from the command line.

C:\myfiles>copy * C:\test

This command copies all the files in the C:\myfiles directory to the C:\test directory. This works very well if you are just copying the files from one directory to another and not needing to rename the files.

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I had a large set of zip files that I needed to extract. I could have used the built-in functionality in Windows XP but I really did not want to walk through the extraction wizard for each zip file. So I looked around for something I could use from the command line and I came across Info-ZIP. Once I had downloaded and extracted the utilities, I opened a command window and cd'd to the directory that contained all the zip files. Once there, I ran the following commands. The first one extracted the contents of the zip files (I was lucky and the structure of the zips included a new directory) and the second moved the zip file into its corresponding new directory.

C:\zips>for /f %j in ('dir /b *.zip') do [full path to]\unzip %j

C:\zips>for /f "delims=. tokens=1,2" %j in ('dir /b *.zip') do move %j.%%k %j

I hope this post was of some use to you. If it didn't, I am always looking for new scripts to add so submit a request for your question or need and I will see if I can answer it.

Dave

I know most everyone uses a mouse as their primary means for doing most everything on a PC and the mice work well. I find that using the mouse and certain keyboard combinations work extremely well for me.

Here are the keyboard combinations I use most frequently:

windows + l - to lock computer
windows + m - minimize all open windows
windows + f - find / search
windows + e - open explorer window
windows + r - open run window
windows + u - open utility manager

control + z - undo
control + x - cut
control + c - copy
control + v - paste
control + n - new window / file
control + a - select all
control + s - save
control + f - find / search
control + p - print
control + o - open file / web page

Hopefully these will be as useful to you as they are to me.

Dave