A short article but interesting I think, with some good comments already. I think in general triggers are under used, except in the cases where they are abused of course. Here's the article: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/61483/ Read more

We were lucky enough to have Joe come to Orlando to speak at SQLSaturday and we also talked him into doing a one day seminar about all things SQL. If you've read his books you know he sat on the SQL ANSI committee for a while and that he is… Read more

I'm just finishing up sending out thank you emails to the volunteers, speakers, and sponsors that helped make our first SQLSaturday a great success. We ended up with 217 attendees. The event really went well, we had no major problems and surprisingly few minor problems. We did overestimate on soda… Read more

I'll post Part III of Becoming a DBA tomorrow (meaning there will be two posts). Veterans' Day is typically celebrated on the 11th, but when it comes on a weekend, we tend to formally observe it on the following Monday. Today is a day in the United States where we…

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One of the things I discuss in my Successful Technical Speaking class (it's a free class, usually once a quarter) is to take the results of the attendee evaluations with at least one grain of salt. I've come to pay less attention to the overall scores (assuming I didn't totally… Read more

As a DBA, most of us will also take care of test environment. However test servers usually cannot afford to be as powerful as the real production servers.

One of the issue I got in my test environment is I also need to do regular t-log backup for the testing… Read more

Work responsibilities took up my time on Thursday and Friday, so I never got around to posting. Here's the resources I planned on covering on Friday: online sources for SQL Server security.

Website: Center for Internet Security - SQL Server Benchmarks

CIS is well known for producing quality benchmarks for…

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There was a time that I avoided bcp utility like the plague. A few years ago, we needed to set up a once a month job to transfer about 100 GB of data from one server to another. Since this involved two SQL Server 2000 instances, the first attempt was… Read more

We (End to End Training) will be hosting our Celko on SQL seminar tomorrow (Nov 9th). It's not too late to register and we will be able to accept a limited number of walk ins. If you're near Orlando it would be a shame not to see Celko live!

Registration…

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Apex SQL has announced a new version of Apex SQL Log as well as an API for it.

• Release Notes for Apex SQL Log
• Apex SQL Log API product page

From the product page, it looks like the API can be used to create auditing capabilities using the transaction log…

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I happened to get an email asking me to vote for a product that was being featured in one of those reader/user vote contest/award things, and what caught my eye was a bit about what they were doing to prevent fraud. Here are the rules:

• Only one vote per…

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Building upon my post from last Tuesday, if you know all the roles for a given user, you'll probably want all the permissions as well. In prior versions of SQL Server, the way to go was the system stored procedure sp_helprotect. However, sp_helprotect is stuck in legacy SQL…

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Had an interesting debate with Andy Warren on the tuning editorial today. I'm not sure we agree completely, but it's always good to debate things.

Steve McConnell has lived an interesting career with regards to software and while I'm not sure he's always right, he has thought about it and…

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I was just reading the October 2007 issue and they have done what magazines are apt to do; redesign themselves to take a fresher approach. Cynically I'm not sure this is anything except billable time for the graphics and layout team, but this time it does look like they are… Read more

I try my best to get things right the first time. So often, correcting a mistake or bad choice is costly: more costly than it would have been to take the time to do it right the first time. However, as SQL Server MVP Andy Leonard points out, sometimes you…

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Another note from a friend. They decided to upgrade a large varchar column to varchar(max) and subsequently found strange behavior in things that used to work. It would only render to an web page if they did an explicit cast to varchar(some size) and without that if you tested the… Read more

This is a follow-up to part I from last week. You've considered what you want to do, you've looked at your soft skills, and you still want to be a DBA. How then do you get started?

The first thing to do is decide which platform you're going to focus…

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Steve is the guy who wrote Code Complete (get rev 2 if you buy) which I consider to be required reading if you want to be a professional developer and occasionally he'll have some pretty interesting stuff on his blog. This time it was about technical debt, a subject near… Read more

Most people 'set it and forget it' when it comes to replication, not realizing that changes to rows on the publisher are applied one row at a time on the subscriber using the system generated procs created on the subscriber. I actually tend to agree with the concept, opting for… Read more

This is an older article that was recycled for Fri, but still seems to get a decent number of views and some good discussion. It's fun to see who sees the power of Access and not just the pain! I still use Access for some really adhoc reporting and for… Read more