If you have ever needed to create a report but dont know what table you are looking for this might help you out. In my case I had to find something that had the "Publisher".

 To look for columns in view...

USE
Symantec_CMDB
SELECT
V.name AS View_name,
SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS schema_name,
c.name AS column_name
FROM sys.views AS v
INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON v.OBJECT_ID = c.OBJECT_ID
WHERE c.name LIKE '%Publisher%'
ORDER BY schema_name, View_name;

To look for columns in tables...

USE
Symantec_CMDB
SELECT t.name AS table_name,
SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS schema_name,
c.name AS column_name
FROM sys.tables AS t
INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON t.OBJECT_ID...

This week I had a remote session to help a customer troubleshoot SQL Connectigvity issues. This was a ressurgence of an hold issue, namely the Client Message Dispatcher service would throw regular errors indicating that the Sql Connection is not available or was closed.

The customer had migrated from a local SQL instance to a remote SQL Server (which had multiple benefits, including the switch to a 64-bit platform there) and the problem was apparantly resolved. However it came back this week, so we took a fresh look at it.

First we needed to instrument the Client Message Dispatcher, to acertain whether the issue was really impacting or not. If you are a regular reader of my blog post you will know what my standard answer to these kind of issues is: Altiris Profiler.

Only that the profiler would throw an exception on invokation, of type Cryptographic ... We solved that one issue thanks to Google and the Symantec KB, by simply crafting a new Sql Connection string...

I have collected Symantec.pl.xml files since the beta in February 2009 and have a repository of 2.5 GiB of XML here at home. I am not devoting much time to the task to be completely honnest, as a shell script take care of verifying if a new file is available every 5 minutes.

I have also crafted a few (Linux) utilities to get some information out of the xml files. The first one was just a file cleaner that hanlded the task of clearing the pl.xml from any localisation. I never made much use of it, however it was of great help when I discussed with the product team improvments that later came to the prioduct listing and how the Symantec Install Manager handles it (first a compressed version of the file and then a langaue agnostic version). The second utility is still in use scrapes package related data from the xml, and crafts a mirror tree of the SolutionSam site. It even has the feature to copy MSI files to the correct location if they are in the same folder as the tool....