If you’ve been around SQL for any length of time it’s hard not to have heard of Brad McGehee, the blogger DBA behind Aloha DBA. Brad ran SQL-Server-Performance.com for many years and now works for Red Gate, spending a lot more time on the road than I’d want to… Read more

We had a spammer post a bunch of random, silly posts last week. I knew it was an issue when my email went crazy with posts. I think 10 or 12 people sent me notes about different posts. We also had some issues the same day with inappropriate posts and… Read more

Journalists are important.  In my opinion, they’re very important. The best journalists, like Old Testament prophets, speak truth to power and reveal the ugly dirt behind the pretty and public veneer of… Read more

Over the past several years, I have given 2-3 live web presentations a year, and I have always found them to be an adventure. In other words, there always seems to be one problem or another.

Sometimes the meeting software used is not very cooperative, connection speeds vary (or drop),… Read more

Recently I got a forum question that I thought would be a good blog entry for others to share.

The question was

“Adam, Is there a way to get the ultimate parent of a member when you have no idea what level it is at, how many levels separate it…

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Hot Off The Presses !

This isn’t like when you stood in line at the kissing booth in high school. SQL Server 2008 R2 has a real date for release. It will be on the May price list and available May 2010. This is important since we have so many…

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I have been tinkering lately with database snapshots and I thought the subject warranted a short post on the subject. This post will details a few things of note about snapshots and how to create a snapshot on your database.

Database snapshot provide a read-only point in time view of… Read more

Should we as DBAs be worried that we will become surplus to requirements  if Oracle continues to enhance its capabilities to deliver a self-managing database ?

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I used to build the Database Weekly newsletter and write the editorial every week. It was a chore, and it’s a grind. I have to go through hundreds of blog entries and news feeds, pick up the 40 or 50 ones that I think DBAs are interested in, and load… Read more

If you’ve used SQL Server 2008 Management Studio (SSMS 2008), you may have noticed that Microsoft added a pretty neat little feature when looking at Execution Plans, the Missing Index message. This subtle message may appear when you’re looking at either the Actual or Estimated Query Execution Plan in graphical… Read more

I was lucky enough to attend the MVP Summit held last week in Redmond and Bellevue. I attended the Summit in 2008, but had to miss 2009 because I couldn't get away from work. The cool thing about this Summit was the number of my friends attending that I know from… Read more

 

WOW – what a great turnout for our webinar series today. We had two sessions on Monday, looking for some great tips on getting started with management studio and introduction to T-SQL. We have over 750 people for each session, allowing us to help over 1500 folks get going in… Read more

After yesterdays’ webinar, we got a lot of great feedback and questions. Once of the more common questions was around intellisense, getting it to work and why some folks don’t have it, even though they are running SQL 2008.

The trick here is, you need to be running SQL 2008…

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IntelliSense in SQL Server 2008 can sometimes not be very intelligent.  It’s there to help you can sometimes cause more problems than it does solve problems.  Here’s one of those problems cases:

Create a table without using the UI.  Just type a basic script to create a…

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Back a couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in a Pain of the Week webcast with Kevin E. Kline on SQL injection. The webinar archive is now online if you didn't get a chance to view it live:

 

Quest Pain of the Week Webcast - SQL Injection… Read more

I’m in the early stages of a book on managing and I’m starting to look for situations that might trigger ideas on areas I want to cover, and for situations that serve as good what would you do (WWYD) scenarios for potential managers. Scenarios give you a chance to practice… Read more

I had an issue with a user recently. Actually it has been going on over a few weeks, due to both of us being busy and slow to respond to the other, but basically a user had two accounts. They had lost the password, changed jobs, and registered a new…

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Introduction

I am frequently getting requests for a new server to do this or that. Running through the usual questions to determine scope and scale, the price can get high pretty quickly. Inevitably,  talk turns to ideas on how to cut the cost while still delivering a robust platform. Typically… Read more

I really must thank Steve for his editorial on FizzBuzz.  It seemed like a really good topic to do some testing and comparison.  Then the comments started rolling in on the topic.  This provided more information and ideas to use for this article.  As trivial as it may seem,… Read more

After seeing an interesting blog post on AnandTech IT last week that showed slower query response time in x64 SQL Server 2008 running on x64 Windows Server 2008 when using the default “Balanced” power plan compared to the “High performance” power plan (in Windows), I decided to do some investigation… Read more