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When creating a SSRS report, you want to add lines that display trends. You want to show trends for more than one data point. And you want to conditionally format the data point.

In this example, I use Sparklines and a simple expression to create a sparkling report!

Below is… Read more

Just a quick one today chaps, to show how you can restart the SQL Server Agent Service using PowerShell.

Whilst covering the Production Ops Shift in our shop over the weekend I discovered that Database Mail had not been configured for the SQL Server Agent on a number… Read more

About two weeks ago, I wrote about SQL Server Podcasts and why I love that medium so much.

Today, I want to talk about the various video sources for SQL Server (luckily for us, there are lots of them).

The video medium is great because you can view sessions from… Read more

I will be presenting the session “Data Warehouse Architecture” this Wednesday, Feb 27th at 11:00am CST to the PASS DBA virtual chapter.  Below is the abstract.  It will be a remote presentation that you can join online.  Details are here.  This will be the same presentation that… Read more

by Steve Bolton

                The data mining method known as Time Series is aptly named, because it seems to take a long series of time to get it right.
                Out of the nine algorithms included in SQL Server Data Mining (SSDM), Time Series is on a par with Neural Networks in… Read more

SQL Server is in the Cloud as Windows Azure SQL Database, but in the Cloud, still have some limitations that are not supported and here are some of them (short info):

SQL Server 2008 R2 features that are not supported by Azure SQL Database:

• SQL Server Utility
• Master Data Services

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Functions might seem to be the answer to all of your desires to consolidate code, and at times they could be.  But if you don’t know enough about them, they may turn out to be the source of all of your problems and opening the door to architecture choke full… Read more

How can I check what all SQL server features and version are installed on my Machine ?

It’s a frequently asked question. You need to study your environment, need to login each instance to check version & other details, to answer this question.

Till SQL Server 2005, you have no… Read more

In a little over a week, SQL Saturday #187 takes place in Richmond, VA. I’m looking forward to going back as I attended school not too far from there (Charlottesville), and even worked on the West side of Richmond for a time. My brother lives in MD and my mother… Read more

Typically, I am a big advocate of performance monitor but one place I commonly see performance monitor being misused is with benchmarking disk counters for SQL Server.  Typically, you will see people applying best practices like having dedicated spindles for transactional log files and dedicated spindles for data files.  With… Read more

Every day, I link out a few blogs posts and articles that I’ve read or used from across the internet.  Here are the top ten of the items that I linked out last week.  Typically, these are the tweets from things I read in the evenings and then share throughout… Read more

Welcome to Day 25 of my “A Month of PowerShell” series. This series will use the series landing page on this blog at http://blog.waynesheffield.com/wayne/a-month-of-powershell/. Please refer to this page to see all of the posts in this series, and to quickly go to them.

We all know that we… Read more

In just a couple of weeks I’ll be flying down to Richmond, VA to speak at SQL Saturday #187. I’ll be presenting two topics, Backups for the Accidental DBA and Query Tuning in the Clouds. It’s going to be a great event with a bunch of excellent speakers. If… Read more

When writing a script to change a piece of code, say a stored procedure or view, there are 3 basic options.  I’ll start at the outset by saying I use all 3 and that they each have their pluses and minuses.  I’m not trying to advocate one or another, just… Read more

Building a computer, at least in the beginning, feels like something you have to do holistically and at the same time like a chicken and the egg scenario. For example, what size power supply you buy depends on what you’re going to use for your video card. Not all video… Read more

Below script will calculate total number of days based on the input from user from 1st Jan. Though we have a built in function DATEDIFF from which we can calculate this easily. But in the below script, i have tried calculating the days without this built in function.

I have…

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Most Server Administrators, whether Database Administrators or not, are quite familiar with the Remote Desktop Connection (a.k.a. RDP) tool, which is formerly known as the Microsoft Terminal Services Connector accessible from the command mstsc in Run, or from a Command Prompt.  What most do not realise, however, is that there… Read more

For day 29 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recover series, I want to talk about restoring replicated databases from database snapshots. Someone asked me recently if I had any recommendations for speeding up their unit testing on replicated databases. He has to run unit tests over and over on…

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