Network Speed Test on Windows 10

If you want to test your network speed on Windows 10, Network Speed Test from the Windows Store is a great little app! Both download and upload speeds are measured. Are you a 2 Mbps maestro or a Gigabit superhero. Find out now.

Where is the Curly F Symbol in Word?

Microsoft Edge - The Heir Apparent to Internet Explorer

Microsoft Edge is the default browser for Windows 10, replacing Internet Explorer 11. The browser has an inbuilt PDF reader, Adobe Flash player and low level JavaScript.

Table Properties in Word - Mastering Table Sizing (aka "Percentage Sizing")

You have just added a column to the right of your table....and the table has expanded beyond the margin.  What do you do?

Right click the table and choose Table Properties.

Click the Table tab:

1. Ensure text wrapping is set to "None"
2. Set Preferred Width to be measured in Percent (as opposed to cm).
3. Select 100%.

All done.

The Internet Society - Keeping the Internet Free and Open

The Internet Society is an organisation dedicated to ensuring that the Internet stays open and transparent. 

Simple SSH for Windows Wizards - PowerShell Support is Nigh!

Secure Shell (SSH) sometimes known as Secure Socket Shell is something that comes from the UNIX world but is occasionally needed by Windows wizards as well.

A basic level knowledge of SSH is therefore cannot be avoided.

SSH in the UNIX world refers to the command-line tool and protocol to access a remote computer. It is used widely in network administration.

The connection is encrypted at both ends with a digital certificate, passwords too are encrypted.

Microsoft have announced they will bring SSH to PowerShell.

Also interesting is Posh-SSH.

Partitioning a Database

Partitioning means breaking up a database into sections - to make it more performant, easier to manage or for load balancing.

Partitioning Criteria

RDBMs' support a range of partitioning criteria. They take a partitioning key and assign a partition based on certain criteria. Example criteria are:

• Hash partitioning - membership of a partition is determined by the value of a hash function. This function might return numbers between 0 to 4, for example, if there are 5 partitions.
• Range partitioning - selects partition if partitioning key lies within a given range. For example, if you have a list of countries, you may split on a country with the letter M, say Malawi, Malta or the Maldives.
• List partitioning - the partition is assigned a list of values. If the row satisfies the criteria (e.g. Country column is contained in List A) then it goes into, say, partition A.
• Composite partitioning - hybrid of the above approaches.

Means of Partitioning

"Horizontal partitioning" or "horizontal sharding" involves putting different rows into different tables. A view with a union may be used to create a unified view.

"Vertical partitioning" involves taking normalisation to the next level. It involves creating tables with fewer columns and using additional tables to store the extra columns - a bit like normalisation, except vertical partitioning can be effected even when the tables are normalised. Infrequently used columns might be stored on a different device. This type of partitioning is also known as "row splitting" - the row is split by the columns.