I read this piece from Troy Hunt, which is a long look at the password reset process for a web application. It’s one of the first that I’ve seen which talks about the different implementations, along with the pitfalls and advantages of each.

It’s a great look at passwords,… Read more

One of the most amazing features to an old SQL Server 4.2 guy was the addition of DDL triggers to the server. As with any trigger, these can be problematic in that they can overload a server, and they ALWAYS fire, so you can cause yourself problems, but in terms… Read more

Even though I’ve recently changed jobs, I’ll still be speaking at a lot of SQL events across the country and internationally.  There are still a few trips that I’ve yet to finalize, in particular with the fine folks in Houston, run by my friend Nancy Hidy (blog | twitter Read more

I just composed and sent this message to eleven members of a single California-based recruitment company. I’ll let the email speak for itself, but you, dear reader, should also know that the positions they reference range from Business Objects to Android programming, with nary a DB job in sight. Read more

Welcome back, folks!

Ok so, now that we’ve covered the basics of creating a SQL Audit and viewing the output, let’s put the pieces together to form a complete solution. As with any implementation, the key to success lies in careful planning. Before we take off running, we need… Read more

BCP, or bulk copy program, has been around in SQL Server for a long time. It is a great way to export large quantities of data very quickly from SQL Server. It can be used to export entire tables or even a custom query. In this post we will focus… Read more

OLAP PivotTable Extensions is a really cool free add-in for Excel that’s been around for quite a while now.  It allows you to have some exposure to what’s going on under the covers (Among many other features) while you browse a cube using an Excel PivotTable. This weekend there has… Read more

I’m having a little fun with documenting basic information about indexes in my current project. I’m posting the scripts here mostly for me to come back when I need them in the future, but hopefully some of you might find them useful.

Find tables without any index:

This script… Read more

Reading Excel data isn't easy.  It should be, but there's a lot of unfortunate barriers in the way that I've discussed before.  They boil down to one main reason: Excel wasn't created for IT, it was created for business users.  We're quite obviously an afterthought.  That said, we're much more…

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As a DBA, we have to take various actions based on huge amount of information received. In one perspective, our productivity is limited by our capability bandwidth to process the information received. However, if this information is frequently “polluted or even poisoned”, our productivity is surely compromised.

I define “polluted… Read more

Hey, did I mention that Pittsburgh is having a SQLSaturday this year?

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo:Herbert Spencer, used under Creative Commons License.

It's October 6th, at La Roche College, just north of the city proper. A few of us on the committee visited the venue last Thursday, and I have to… Read more

Jen McCown started a #GetHawt set of posts last year and I think it went well. It must have, so she started an invitation for a summer competition. Silly me hadn’t been paying much attention, even though I’d seen the tweets. I finally caught up this last week, and… Read more

Well well well.  It has certainly been a long time between announcements on the blog about meetings for the Las Vegas SQL Server Users Group.

We have had to cancel a couple of times in the past few months – but the meetings have been happening with or without the… Read more

In the same vein as my blog post about Syncing your calendars, I wanted to post how to sync your contacts in Outlook, Gmail (Google Contacts), and iPhone:

- Transfer your Outlook contacts to Gmail via Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Gmail

- In Gmail, remove the duplicates… Read more

Every wonder who all your orphaned SQL Server users are on your server? Just run the script below and copy the results of the query into a new query window then execute them. Make sure you keep the spacing and the quotes as they are so that the Dynamic SQL…

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This is one of our first PowerPivot video tutorials and this short 1 minute tutorial we show how to enable PowerPivot Add-in in Excel 2013. View blog post: http://www.katieandemil.com/457

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I received an phone call from a friend today asking how to move master and resource system databases in Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

Well, the process is very simple and is explained in this blog post:

Moving “master” database

The following are the steps to move master database:

1. Launch SQL…

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I.                    Introduction

A little while ago, my wonderful wife Renee got a Solid State Drive (SSD) for me.  Being a DBA, one of my first thoughts was to wonder what kind of effect this would have on database performance, since I use my home computer for a lot of testing… Read more

In this blog post I show steps that are needed to enable Transparent Data Encyption on a SQL Server 2012 database. I prepared the article to support my learning to 70-462 Administering SQL Server 2012. View Article: http://www.katieandemil.com/456

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