SELECT 'Happy '+ DATENAME(dw, GETDATE())

Welcome to the penultimate installment of SQL Server A to Z (it’s not often I get to use “penultimate”). Officially, Y stands for Year, but that would be kinda boring, and quite short, so let’s run with it and talk about all sorts of date-parts-related… Read more

Holiday Greetings to all you DBA's and SQL Server professionals! This blog goes out to all of you who are on-call this week, or in the office, keeping SQL Servers safe from the grinches.  Hope you enjoy!

Twas the week after Christmas, when all through the office;
Not a client… Read more

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Identifying current service pack installed for SQL Server can be difficult if you don’t know which command to use! Most of the time I have seen people using @@VERSION to check for SQL Server service pack level, which is not correct as it returns the service pack level of operation… Read more

Since the stable and mainly feature-complete versions of SQL Server 2012 have been available, I have been heads-down on multiple BI projects using this software.  SQL Server 2012 is not just the next, incremental build of the same database platforms with a few added features here and there.  No, SQL… Read more

2011 is nearly over. It’s time to list the Top 10 viewed SQLServer-DBA.com posts for the year , based on Views.

1. System Reserved Partition and monitoring
2. Data Loading Performance Guide
3. Mobile Commerce and SQL performance Tuning
4. Index Disabled and Index Rebuild
5. How to report a SQL Server performance problem…

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SQL Server 2012 has many new security features, and three of the bigger new features are: Default Schema for Windows Groups, Audit enhancements, and User-Defined Server Roles.

Default Schema for Windows Groups

A database schema can now be tied to a Windows Group rather than an individual user in order… Read more

Welcome to the Friday Re-Blog summary post.  The aim of these posts is to bring some old posts that newer readers may not have had a chance to see.  Also a chance to bring back to the forefront posts that some may have seen but forgot about.

If you have… Read more

January 8th, 2012 will be the first SQL Saturday for 2012. 104 SQL Saturdays is an amazing number for our community. I will be presenting on Dimensional Modeling based on the Kimball books. Database design and the planning for them has been a necessary start for successful projects.

I… Read more

Basics QA on Extended Event

I am learning Extended Event so this is my first blog on extended event, There is a great whitepaper on XEvent by Jonathan Kehayias.

Q1. What is extended event?

A1. It is a light weighted profiler kind of trace introduced on sql… Read more

Many of you DBAs DB Devs and BI Devs in these days can have some changes from one SQL Server version to another (SQL Server 2012RC0 / 2008 R2 / 2008 / 2005) and when you trying some scripts that you can find here in SSC articles or anywhere else,… Read more

Indeed the Holiday Season is traditionally a season of giving, and being charitable to those who are less fortunate.  Although giving back should be all year-round, the end of the year, coupled with the holiday spirit, (and maybe last minute tax-deductions :-) always rouses folks to be generous.  Nonetheless, giving back is… Read more

One fine day, one of our data driven subscription which was running fine, failed with timeout error.

library!WindowsService_118!eb4!12/20/2011-07:30:01:: i INFO: Handling data-driven subscription 1b850434-fe69-47e5-a227-219d1b2e040c to report /External Reports/Report1, owner: domain\user, delivery extension: Report Server Email.
library!WindowsService_118!1288!12/20/2011-07:30:01:: i INFO: Initializing EnableExecutionLogging to ‘True’ as specified in Server system properties.
library!WindowsService_118!1288!12/20/2011-07:30:01:: i… Read more

What A Diffrince A Year Makes

In January I posted up my new years list basically, stuff I wanted to learn in the last twelve months. Lets take a quick look at last years goals.

SQL Server Stuff

1. Partitioning
Win
Done, and pretty early on. I did a lot… Read more

I got a call from a friend recently that was looking for some query help. He was actually using Access, which I haven’t used in years. He knew a little T-SQL, so he could convert anything I gave him to work with his database.

Here was his issue. He had… Read more

The first round of #meme15 has finished.  In total, there were eighteen people that participated.  If there were more, I missed them, just leave a comment here and I’ll update this post.  We even managed to nab a couple non-SQL people in the first go round.  Maybe next time we’ll… Read more

Merry Christmas everyone!

DECLARE @hohoho char(100)
DECLARE @bells smallint
DECLARE @tiers smallint
DECLARE @maxtiers smallint

SELECT @hohoho = ' ', @tiers = 1, @bells = 1, @maxtiers = 6
PRINT @hohoho

WHILE @tiers < @maxtiers
BEGIN
	SELECT @bells = POWER(@tiers,2), @hohoho = ' '
	WHILE @bells < 12*@tiers
	BEGIN
		SET…

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My presentation on Professional Development Plans ended up being ranked 47th out of 190, with an overall score of 4.63. The range is 1-5 with 5 being good, but it’s also a game of inches. If my score had been 4.5 I would have dropped to 90th place. Solidly in… Read more

Many of you DBAs DB Devs and BI Devs in these days can have some changes from one SQL Server version to another (SQL Server 2012RC0 / 2008 R2 / 2008 / 2005) and when you trying some scripts that you can find here in SSC articles or anywhere else,… Read more

Do you spend seconds, maybe even minutes trying to find things in SSMS?  Ever find yourself scrolling up and down thrown the tree trying to find that one specific object you seek?

Did you know it doesn’t have to be that way?  Microsoft has provided us the tools to help… Read more