The real doomsday date is Tue Jan 19 2038 at 03:14:07

-
Some said it was the Y2K bug we had to worry about, but it's actually Tue Jan 19 2038 03:14:07 you've really to worry about.

There are many, many systems built with time saved as a 32bit long integer value.
The max value of a signed long integer is 2147483647. This value is the number of seconds elapsed since midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970, coordinated universal time (UTC)

Here is an example C program, built with Visual Studio 2010.

__time32_t t;

t = 0;
printf( "The min is %s\n", _ctime32( &t ) ); 

t = 2147483647;
printf( "The max is %s\n", _ctime32( &t) ); 

t = 2147483648;
printf( "The date is %s\n", _ctime32( &t) );

Output:
The min is Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970
The max is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
The date is (null)

So after Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038, the date goes to null which will cause a crash. Let's just hope all the critical (including embedded) systems get fixed before then.

Popular posts from this blog

AWS DynamoDB vs Azure CosmosDB vs Azure Table Storage pricing comparison

-
Image
Using a db size of 10Gb, and 10% writes and 90% reads. Provisioned databases are for 1 year. For AWS SimpleDB the amount of CPU is hard to quantify, so I used the following formulae (0.248+((requestsPerSecond)/1.5*0.14))*usdgbp This matches closly to Azure Table Storage, which is to be expected. Here are the results: (click on image to view) (click on image to view) Zooming into the lower end (click on image to view) Download Azure-CosmosDB-pricing.xlsx spreadsheet here . Summary:   Both AWS and Azure are similar in NoSQL pricing. For the small companies out there needing the cheapest NoSQL options there is Azure Table Storage and AWS SimpleDB . These are the cheapest up until you hit 400 reads per seconds which is plenty for most companies. However, be aware of the per-item size constraints below. Table Storage is about 13ms for a read and CosmosDB is about 8ms. Many developers use Amazon SimpleDB in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon Sim...
Read more

Service Broker sys.transmission_queue clean up

-
If you’re developing a Service Broker application and you misspell your services, forget to create a master key, or do any of the many things that result in your messages not being delivered, then your transmission queue will fill up. Due to the nature of service broker, errors don't occur at the client but rather your messages go in to Service Brokers sys.transmission_queue and are then subsequently processed. If they fail, they stay in the queue. Some errors can be resolved, i.e. missing services. However, others can't, or are just plain difficult. I.e. You've misspelt something, or not used the correct security. To clear your transmission queue you need to end the conversations, this is a handy little script for doing this. Be aware this ends ALL conversations in the queue and so should NEVER be used on a production system. To see how many messages are in your transmission queue, use this SELECT   COUNT ( 1 )   FROM   sys . transmission_queue On my system i7, D...
Read more

Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled

-
I was testing our new SQL Server 2008 enterprise cluster today and managed to get the following SqlException running a C# application: "Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled. Enable "clr enabled" configuration option. The statement has been terminated." The solution is to run the following: EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options' , '1' ; go RECONFIGURE ; go EXEC sp_configure 'clr enabled' , '1' go RECONFIGURE ; -- Turn advanced options back off -- EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options' , '0'; GO
Read more