When I attended SQL Saturday #131 at the Chandler Gilbert Community College, I was struck by a few design elements that I thought were great examples of how a little thought can improve the experience of a space, and use less energy.

The event was outside Phoenix, which is hot.… Read more

This past weekend I attended a SQL Saturday in the desert. SQL Saturday #131 was held in Phoenix, AZ

It’s April, but it was definitely hot. However the campus at Chandler Gilbert Community College was geared to the desert with lots of shade and open spaces. I was surprised how… Read more

I wrote a store procedure which could generate restore script automatically by backup history table. it can help you select a best restore solution base on the backup history table.

For instance,  if you backup the database as the sequence below

ID	backup_start_date	backup_type
1	2012-04-30 18:28:43.000	Full
2	2012-04-30…

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Two days of precons.
60 regular sessions over two days.
The now-famous Women in Technology luncheon.
Open access to Microsoft Customer Service and Support engineers and the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team.

And you’re not GOING? Are you SERIOUS?!?  Do you have any idea how easy it is… Read more

I hope you’ve taken a few minutes to peek in on the nice refresh that’s happened on a bunch of the System Center engineering blogs.  Good things are afoot there.  And if you haven’t checked in, avail yourself of these great resources:

System Center: Service Manager

System Center: Operations Manager Read more

You never know when you’ll encounter corruption. It can happen at any time, usually due to some sort of hardware problem or driver issue. Corruptions don’t disappear and you can’t necessarily

Corruptions can be caused by numerous factors, and it isn’t something you can predict. However sooner or later,… Read more

I received this error the other day when trying to process a particular SSAS cube:

Error      18           File system error: The following file is corrupted: Physical file: file:///\\%3f\E:\SQL\OLAP\Data\Options”>\\?\E:\SQL\OLAP\Data\Options BI QA.0.db\Dim Date.0.dim\1.Year No.bstore. Logical file .                                0              0

I also could not process or browse any cubes at all, even cubes… Read more

Since tomorrow is May 1, I think it is time to publish the latest set of SQL Server 2008 Diagnostic Information Queries. This version works on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. There are a few queries that only work with SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1, but… Read more

As a blogger, you have several options available to you when it comes to writing posts.  You can write them online, directly inside whatever platform you’re using, be it WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, etc.  If you prefer to write posts offline, you can use a text editor like Word or WordPad… Read more

If you make changes to the settings of a database, it can cause the procedure cache to be cleared. Microsoft has documented changes that cause this for all procs within a database (scroll down to just above the examples). But guess what, if you change the DB_CHAINING option, it clears… Read more

Now that SQL Server 2012 is generally available to the public, many companies are looking at the new platform and trying to figure out how to move to it and take advantage of all the new cool features. Unfortunately, some folks haven’t… Read more

This is a very cool and useful tip if you find yourself locked out of the sysadmin role in sql server.

I have a SQL Server instance with the sa account disabled and all other logins removed to simulate a situation were I am locked out of SQL Server. My… Read more

Generally it is considered good practice using two-part names for objects. It make the code more readable and avoids confusion if objects with similar names exists in different schemas. Some features requires that two-part naming must be used such as creating a view WITH SCHEMABINDING.

However, you can also… Read more

Hello Dear Reader, greetings from SQL Saturday 130 in Jacksonville.  This is just a quick post to say that the slide Deck & Scripts are now up and on the Resource Page, I'll follow this up next week with a longer post reviewing the event.  Click Here for the Resource…

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When your service account is expired/disabled or is not having access than sql service could not able to start and you may get an error an en eventvwr as

“Could not open error log file ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG\ERRORLOG’. Operating system error = 5(Access is denied.).

so you just change… Read more

During my SSWUG webcast I was asked to give some examples on how to tune the DefaultBufferMaxRows and DefaultBufferSize, so here goes.

When a source is pulling in data, it places them into buffers; one row=one buffer.  The default setting for DefaultBufferMaxRows=10,000.  This means that the source will… Read more

I enjoyed a long weekend in Houston starting with Kalen Delaney’s Pre-con on Query Tuning. I have learned over the past years that I should concentrate on 2 or 3 items to take from the training. The first was no matter what kind of T-SQL development is done through an… Read more

I attended a course from Edward Tufte a few years ago on Data Visualization, and while I learned some neat things, I never was able to implement them well. I think part of it is a complete lack of an art gene in my person, but I do keep it… Read more

I saw a question in the forums related to inserting new rows into a SQL Server table only if they didn’t exist. The current solution was using an ADO.NET DataTable , checking for new rows and then pushing the rows back to SQL Server by calling the Update method on… Read more

I was recently chatting with Megan Keller, my long-time editor for the Tool Time column and Executive Editor at SQL Server Pro, DevProConnections, and SharePoint Pro.

I’ve subscribed to SQLMag ever since it was first put to print back in the late 1990′s.  (That’s a pic of… Read more