In case you didn't know SQLBits 9 ,”Query across the Mersey”, is taking place in Liverpool from September 21st to October 1st.  3 days of the usual excellent quality presentations, networking interspersed with the odd beer or two should all make for an informative and entertaining conference.  Rumor has… Read more

I've recently been talking to people looking for DBAs and one of the questions that always gets asked early on in the conversation is "Are you willing to relocate?". It's an easy question to ask but not always easy to answer.  I suspect most people would easily give a yes… Read more

A couple of times over the past few months, while in Visual Studio 2008 working on an SSIS package, I went to the toolbox and saw this message:

There we no tools at all showing up.  Apparently the toolbox became corrupted, but fortunately it is easy to fix.  Here were… Read more

Weekday Lunch RAW!

Welcome to the Smack-down ladies and gentleman. I couldn?t believe it when Brian walked into my office the other day and threw down this challenge. He actually thinks he can use one of his tired old webinar topics and get more attendees to show up for his… Read more

Last weekend, as I was waiting for the start of the performance of the Cleveland Orchestra at its summer outdoor venue, Blossom Music Center, a client called with a problem. The databases on his principal production server had failed over to the mirror server, and now he couldn't connect… Read more

On Thursday, Sept 1, 2011 at 7:15pm EST, I’ll be presenting via LiveMeeting to the Curacao SQL Server User Group. This will be my second time presenting to these great folks, and I’m really looking forward for this return visit.

The topic is Banish RBAR!, and the abstract for… Read more

Today I am going to revisit two posts from the past couple of weeks.  I want to revisit them just to make some minor updates and clarifications.  This is nothing earth-shattering but is good info to have.

The two posts to revisit are:

1. Bitwise Operations
2. Derived Table Column Alias

Bitwise…

Read more

    Converting EBCDIC to ASCII in SSIS 2008 can seem like a daunting task. There is a lot of manual work involved in creating a data flow to move data from an EBCDIC system like AS400 or DB2, to an ASCII system like a SQL database. This can be accomplished,… Read more

At the end of last week I received an email from my friend and colleague Sharon Dooley telling me her “Lightening Talk” had been accepted and she would be speaking at the Summit in October. Sharon has many years experience in the IT industry, a former SQL Server MVP, currently…

Read more

SQL Server, EarthQuakes and the End…Of DBAs?

What does the advent and integration of VMs, SSDs, and the Cloud mean for the traditional DBA?

These are very distinct and powerful emerging technologies that can and will have a direct impact on the future of the DBA.  Read on to… Read more

As some of you may know, I am writing a book on indexing.  So far I’ve written and submitted four of the chapters to the publisher.  If anyone ever says, “Writing a book is easy” – kick them.  When they tell you – “it’s really hard” you might want to… Read more

 “By 2014, over 3 billion of the world's adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology”

 The reasons given are:

 1)   “6.5 billion mobile connections by 2014”

2)   “Global adult population to… Read more

I see questions on forums all the time about DBA’s or System Admins finding they are out of drive space due to a very large transaction log.  Post vary a bit on what the admin has tried but a common theme is that they have tried shrinking the file but… Read more

I wrote about the basics of computed columns and also using CASE in a computed column recently, but there’s a better way to implement a computation, and reuse the code. You can include a UDF in a computed column.

UDFs are a great way to encapsulate your code into an… Read more

Wow, how time flies by.  It seems like just a month ago I was made the PASS Regional Mentor for South Central US and now I have given up that position to join Jorge and Adam as Regional Mentors for South East US.  Being I live in GA, it is… Read more

Here’s the link to my editorial on SSC last week. I was pleasantly surprised by the discussion, and was interested to see that rather than strong the word ‘brave’ popped up. That’s interesting to consider, it’s less about technical skills and more about personality, the willingness to fight the hard… Read more

By Ian Treasure

Over the past few years, I have used a number of approaches to monitor SQL Server. For example, I have configured jobs to e-mail the DBA team if they fail. I have written programs to check that everything is OK. I have used a number of third-party… Read more

Executing the code below in SQL Server 2008 will throw an error message:

BACKUP LOG ‘MyDatabase’ WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

Msg 155, Level 15, State 1, Line 44
'TRUNCATE_ONLY' is not a recognized BACKUP option.

It was deprecated in SQL Server 2008.

 Some options for SQL Server 2008 are :

  Read more

What does the emergence and growth of In-memory databases mean for  Datawarehouse? 

 1)  In-Memory database server systems are  fast.  Consideration should be given to hardware purchases, configuration and consolidation. I’ve been working with solidDB over the last few months and the speed differences are obvious. The Query response and commit times are… Read more

A couple a weeks ago I blogged about a few of the enhancements in the OVER clause, and now I will show you guys a couple of new windowing functions, that goes along with the OVER clause. These new functions are FIRST_VALUE() and LAST_VALUE().

I’ll use the same setup… Read more