I’ll be leaving Friday morning with my family to go to Miramar, Fla, for the 2nd annual SQLSaturday there. I’m doing a presentation along with a lot of other speakers, and pleased to see a few new names on the schedule this time. Looking forward to the event, but not… Read more

Last week we announced PASS SQLRally, the new event that we’ll be holding in May 2011 in Orlando (aka the “Spring Event”). A big item is deciding how we want to pick speakers and build the schedule. We have a process we use for the Summit and we could use… Read more

It seems that Thursdays are becoming SQL Saturday day here at my blog. I wrote a few posts about SQL Saturday recently after attending SQL Saturday #22, and have been scheduling them out. Since the first two were on Thursday, I decided to keep this moving forward. The previous…

Read more

If you have ever searched for “commenting in TSQL” scripts, I am sure that you’ve found hundreds or maybe even thousands of blogs or articles written about them. This blog won’t be much different from others out there and it is a very, very, very basic concept. However, time and… Read more

In this quick blog, I want to show you one way of how to find out what indexes you have on a table using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). When you have SSMS running and are connected to the database engine, navigate down the database hierarchy to the Tables folder.… Read more

Indexes play a huge role in the performance of a query. Without indexes, you very simple query to get the last 100 records from a table could take forever to return. Well, maybe not forever, but you get the point. For example, I have a query and its results of… Read more

Blog Title: Checking Users AD Groups Using Windows CMD

 

Depending on your role in the organization, there may be a time when you have to try and determine active directory information for a given user on the network. As a DBA or a consultant, I have found that I’ve had… Read more

Blog Title: Limiting Table Access for Reporting Part 2

 

In the first blog post of this series, I showed you how to create a database schema and how to create a view. In this post, I will wrap it all up and show you how to create a SQL Server… Read more

End users may have a need to do some form of reporting of data from source systems. Opening up the database tables to end users normally isn’t the best practice, but different situations often require different implementations right? In this blog series, I am going to show you one method… Read more

What are we talking about?

Recently Microsoft released a new version of SQL Server 2008 R2 called Parallel Data Warehouse Edition. there has been a lot of buzz about this new architecture because it is Microsoft’s entry into the Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) Scale out data warehousing arena. Typically Microsoft… Read more

Ok, now that I have your attention this really should be titled the danger of not qualifying all objects, but that isn’t quite as sensational enough to make you click through to here

Imagine if you will, a developer expects ten records to be inserted into a table and the… Read more

I work for a very large company where divisions are spread out literally all over the world. There are many times where I have to confer with someone else remotely in order to get something done or figure out an issue. When working on a server we all know and… Read more

Introduction 

Replication is the process of copying data between two databases on the same server or different servers on the same database. This is one of the methods to maintain the redundant database site for disaster recovery purpose.  Replication methodology maintains copies of main database from the primary server on… Read more

…or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I had a SQL dev’s dream come to me via email yesterday: a high-urgency, high-profile request for data that was both interesting and doable. I spent a few hours on it last night and this morning, and handed over… Read more

Now that we are into the third quarter of 2010 I decided to post an update of my 2nd quarter goals and post goals for the 3rd quarter.  If you all have been following my blog or me on twitter (patrickdba) you know that I was selected as a SQL… Read more

I’ll be speaking for the SQL PASS Database Administration Virtual Chapter today at 12 PM Eastern time.  The topic will be Using XML to Query Execution Plans.  The abstract for the event is the following:

SQL Server stores its execution plans as XML in dynamic management views. The execution…

Read more

Happened to notice in my weekly LinkedIn update today that Todd McDermid had signed up for the 2010 Summit event on LinkedIn. Easy to forget LinkedIn, but it’s a really good way to see who else will be there that you know…and that you don’t know. Here is the link Read more

This puzzle is rather simple, but it does introduce a few new things. Using T-SQL you typically filter queries with a WHERE clause.  You can also do the same with MDX, but just like T-SQL there are a few ways to accomplish this.  In this puzzle you will see an… Read more

LiteSpeed for SQL Server version 6.0 was released in June 2010 and includes these key features:

• Fast Compression Backups – Fast Compression is Quest’s patent-pending backup technology which significantly reduces backup times, improves database recoverable, and automatically reduces a database’s backup footprint by up to 85 percent over and above…

Read more

This week at SQL University we are talking about capacity planning. I am the guest lecturer for this topic, and covered a broad overview of what capacity planning means for DBAs to start the week. In this installment, we will look specifically at disk requirements and how to plan for… Read more