http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Content tagged Administering, Miscellaneous posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/In this article, Brian looks at how Citrix MetaFrame can use SQL Server for its internal data repository. The basic operation of SQL Server in a Citrix MetaFrame installation is covered. In addition, Brian looks at how a DBA is an integral part of the support team for a successful Citrix MetaFrame farm. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/citrix_metaframe/683/2007/03/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/citrix_metaframe/683/In the second of a series of articles that targets the DBA new to an organization, this article looks at how to manage DTS packages. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingdtspackageseditingschedulingandviewingpack/890/2006/10/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingdtspackageseditingschedulingandviewingpack/890/Ensuring that your disk subsystem performs well and does not run out of space is a balancing act that many DBAs learn over time through trial and "out of space" errors. New author Arindam Banerjee takes a look at some of the things to consider when capacity planning. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/analyzingdiskcapacityforsqlserver/2467/2006/07/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/analyzingdiskcapacityforsqlserver/2467/Attaching and detaching databases is old hat these days right? Do you know how to reattach a database that has more than 16 files? Or do you know what happens if you try to reattach a database that had two log files but one is missing/deleted? And even if you know the answer to that - do you know how to fix it without restoring from backup? Maybe it's not ALL old hat just yet! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/attachanddetachagain/656/2006/06/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/attachanddetachagain/656/Auditing, analyzing and documenting your SQL Server installation is becoming more important all the time, especially as more and more attention is being paid to the security of your environment. Chad Miller brings us a look at a framework and a sample document you can use in your environment to conduct an audit. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/conductingasqlserveroperationalaudit/2079/2005/10/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/conductingasqlserveroperationalaudit/2079/Query Analyzer is a great tool for developing SQL code. There are a number of little tricks that can greatly increase the amount of work you can do with very little effort. This article starts looking at some of the features of this tool. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/queryanalyzertricks/877/2005/05/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/queryanalyzertricks/877/This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/Performing routine database maintenance such as reindexing is important for keeping your databases running at peak performance. When you use INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements to modify table data, indexes can become fragmented. Index fragmentation can happen when the logical sequence of pages is disrupted or when an index page contains less than its maximum amount of data, creating a gap in the data page or index. As indexes become fragmented, you get inefficient data reads when accessing tables and slower database performance. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1772/2005/03/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1772/Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlmaintenanceplans/663/2005/03/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlmaintenanceplans/663/Mindy explores the metadata stored in SQL 2000 to show you how to produce a simple and useful data dictionary! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/datadictionaryfromwithinsqlserver2000/607/2005/02/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/datadictionaryfromwithinsqlserver2000/607/For the most part the DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator) just works. What happens when it doesn't? Chris had to resolve an issue with it recently and documented some of the steps he used. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/debuggingmsdtcissues/1257/2004/01/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/debuggingmsdtcissues/1257/Are you using alerts to help you keep track of things? Are you using as many alerts as you should be? Jeremy has a great list of alerts that he considers so important they are on his 'best practice' list. Definitely worth reading. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/alertalertbackupandrestorebaby/1253/2004/01/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/alertalertbackupandrestorebaby/1253/Haidong continues to point out ideas that might get you thinking about ways you can do more administration with less work. In this article he demonstrates a couple useful tasks you can do with xp_cmdshell. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingxp_cmdshell/1250/2004/01/05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingxp_cmdshell/1250/This is one of the vendors we met at PASS 2003. Their new driver is supposed to be faster than the driver provided by Microsoft AND supports NT authentication. Link takes you to a comparision chart of features. (Not Reviewed)http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1206/2003/12/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1206/One of our favorite authors is back with a great how-to on log shipping. This isn't the baked in log shipping, this is a code your own solution that gives you a starting point for your situation. Even if you don't need it now, it's worth looking at to gain a better understanding of how shipping works. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/customlogshipping/1201/2003/11/26http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/customlogshipping/1201/This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/Another product review! Chris put AdeptSQL (a schema comparison and sync product) to work and wrote up the results. This article also includes some feedback from the vendor that is worth reading. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofadeptsql/1173/2003/11/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofadeptsql/1173/Aladdin is an "alter table" script generation tool for SQL Server 7/2000. Aladdin is currently in BETA. They are currently looking for for 25 people willing to use the beta product and report their experiences. Users who fully participate in the beta will get a free, single user license when the product is released. To participate in the Aladdin BETA program, please download the software and send an email to Ken Otto: ottosoft@hotmail.com - Subject: Aladdin Beta Test. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1139/2003/10/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1139/Don't like the blackbox approach of maintenance plans? Like the maintenance plans but need a tweak to suit your needs? New author Robin Back has put together a monster script to allow you to build your own quickly and easily. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/createmaintenancejobwithaclickwithoutusingawizard/1102/2003/08/20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/createmaintenancejobwithaclickwithoutusingawizard/1102/Andy returns to the Worst Practice series this week with a short article looking at how connection strings in applications affect what you see in sysprocesses. Perhaps less controversial (in our opinion) that some of the other worst practices, this is something easy to fix and definitely worth fixing! Read the article and post a comment - explore other points of view! Readers posting a comment will be entered in a drawing for a copy of the SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticebadconnectionstringsandbadinfoinsyspr/802/2003/08/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticebadconnectionstringsandbadinfoinsyspr/802/We asked Chris to put together some information on how he uses VSS, a subject that comes up a lot as we have articles and discussions that involve change management. Change management isn't easy, you definitely need a pattern to work from. This two part article gives you a pattern you can start with and customize to your needs. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/examplevssframeworksourcecodemanagementpart1/1070/2003/07/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/examplevssframeworksourcecodemanagementpart1/1070/Andy has been busy lately on a project you'll be hearing more about soon (!), but he did manage to get part four of his managing jobs series done. This article discusses ideas for patterns to follow when building jobs, including writing to the console, setting errorlevels, and how to get them installed on the server. DBA's, if you're not developers, look at this article - this is stuff you can take to your development team and get better/more manageable jobs. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart4/1037/2003/06/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart4/1037/David takes us through why he believes trying to run SQL and IIS on the same box is a bad idea. It's a common notion that it IS a bad thing to do, but you have real justification? Read this and you will! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlandiisonthesamebox/1027/2003/06/20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlandiisonthesamebox/1027/Another new author! Gheorge shares some ideas about importing event logs and using OLAP to analyze the results. Not a bad idea at all. How many of use OLAP as often as we should? Read the article, see if it's something you want to try - and let Gheorge know what you think! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/importingandanalyzingeventlogs/997/2003/05/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/importingandanalyzingeventlogs/997/Collations hard to sort out (I know, bad joke)? Mike did what a good DBA gets paid to do, figure out an easy way to fix something and remove the chance of a user mistake at the same time. Good explanation and a couple scripts show how to handle column level collations. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/changingroguedatabasecollations/994/2003/05/26http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/changingroguedatabasecollations/994/This articles makes the case for using SQL LiteSpeed over other backup solutions and presents some notes about why the DBA should manage backups rather than offloading to network administration. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/integratingsqllitespeedinyourexistingbackupinfrast/986/2003/05/12http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/integratingsqllitespeedinyourexistingbackupinfrast/986/Seagate has a white paper out that discusses how faster (15k rpm) drives can lead to lower cost of ownership. Interesting, and worth looking into. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/983/2003/05/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/983/This article by Simon Galbraith (from Red Gate software, maker of SQL Compare) discusses migrating changes from development to staging, QA, and on to production. If you've never seen the need for a schema compare tool (Steve Jones!), this is worth reading.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/982/2003/05/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/982/New author! Mike Pearson discusses how auto close was at the root of a performance problem he was troubleshooting, how you can check your servers easily, and discusses why both auto close and auto shrink are bad ideas in a production environment. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/autocloseandautoshrinkjustdont/984/2003/05/05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/autocloseandautoshrinkjustdont/984/