How time flies - it really has been almost 2 1\2 weeks since the 2010 PASS Summit came to a close! I'd like to say thank you again if you chose to come to my session - there were so many great ones during each time slot that I'm honored… Read more

So we started this show with the Pledge, got wowed with the Turn and finally we’ve come to the last step: the Prestige! During the last stage of our act we saw a glimpse of the magic of the Summit and we also saw a certain object near… Read more

While flipping through this month’s SQL Server Magazine (December 2010), I came across what I thought was a very interesting top 10 list of “Favorite Go-To Websites for SQL Server Solutions”. I could not find the list on the website, but if you have the December… Read more

One of the most important take-aways from David Dewitt’s presentation at the PASS Summit was the level of fear within the Query Processing team at Microsoft caused by regressions. If you missed Dr. Dewitt’s presentation, I tried to capture as much of it as I… Read more

I read Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly after a reference to it in an audio book. It’s the story of KPMG CEO Eugene O’Kelly, a man that worked his way to the top and worked a lot. A great example was flying to Australia just to sit next to a…

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With the NOLOCK hint (or setting the isolation level of the session to READ UNCOMMITTED) you tell SQL Server that you don’t expect consistency, so there are no guarantees. Bear in mind though that “inconsistent data” does not only mean … Continue reading →

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Up through SQL Server 2008 R2 database mirroring has been limited to a single mirror for each database. While that does work well for many companies, as you become larger and more dependent on your computer systems, there is a need to have multiple mirrors.

Often someone wants to failover… Read more

If you are anything like me, you document your SSIS packages for those who may have to maintain them after you move on to other projects. One thing that have disliked is how annotations worked in SSIS. There is no word wrap setting to automatically wrap to the next line,… Read more

What if I told you that you could sign an assembly that your Windows application uses with a certificate, load that certificate into SQL Server and then define rights on that user-assembly combination? The perfect world where a user would have different rights based on the application they are running… Read more

A while ago I blogged about using xp_cmdshell to execute a PowerShell script in SQL Server and return a result set. At that time I was using PowerShell V1, but now with PowerShell V2 I can clean this up a little. The improved version uses the built-in PowerShell V2 cmdlet… Read more

Defensive Db Programming Chapter 10

After dragging this review on for months now, it is finally time to bring this bad boy home and wrap it up.  I have been working through a chapter by chapter review of the book by Alex Kuznetsov (Blog | Twitter).  Alex has… Read more

It’s the end of November and this will probably be my last update on PASS for the year as things slow down for the holidays. This seems like a good time to update you on ongoing projects and to think about where I’ll be headed next year.

As I look… Read more

TechEd will be in Atlanta next year, May 16-19, 2011 at the Georgia World Conference Center. I went this year to the one in New Orleans and would like to go again in 2011, though the one wrinkle for me is that it’s the week immediately following SQLRally. I’m…

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I’ve been living with my Droid X phone for a couple weeks now. It’s definitely a big change from my Blackberry. As I think about what to you tell about it, it’s hard to separate the phone from the software from the usefulness, but I’ll try to share thoughts on…

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CDC Interoperability with Mirroring and Recovery

The following email came in to a discussion group last week asking several questions about CDC including the interoperability of CDC and database mirroring.

The email:

Dear experts

Here are some questions regarding CDC in SQL Server 2008:

1. What will happen to CDC if…

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I highly encourage people to blog. I know that not everyone is a writer, but I think that blogging helps build some extremely valuable skills: communication skills. We all need them, and they help us in our careers, no matter what your job.

At SQLServerCentral, we’ve had a blog section… Read more

Last week I suggested to others that we institute a little idea theft and put together a few blog posts sharing the things in life we are thankful for.  As the holiday season is upon us and that whole Thanksgiving thing happened in the United States this seemed like a… Read more

Coming back after a week off, even a holiday week when traffic is relatively low, is no fun. I have tons of email, lots of articles, and more than a few meetings to get to as well as a lot of writing to catch up on.

I had hoped to… Read more

The other day I was asked to provide the port number that a SQL Server instance was listening on. As luck would have it, the log file from the last time SQL Server started had rolled off so I was left with either using remote desktop to log onto the… Read more

Windows PowerShell has the concept of execution policy that determines in which cases script and configuration files are able to run. The various execution policy settings are described in about_Execution_Policies. Run Get-Help about_execution_policies or see the online version for additional information.

The default setting for the execution policy is restricted… Read more