If you attended one of the sessions I promised to post the links we discussed here. I have done my best to include everything we talked about but we covered a lot of ground. If you notice a link that I promised to share is missing then please let me… Read more

Today’s SQL University post will highlight the need to have a methodology to address issues that we as IT professionals may encounter in the course of our day. We will start off by looking at why we need to have a plan for every situation, and then we will dig… Read more

Office politics during a major event can be dangerous. It pays to be seen as contributing to solving the problem rather than being seen as a part of it. We may have the best intentions and know our systems inside and out but if we refuse to look into something… Read more

It should come as no surprise that the first topic I am covering this week is communication because the first thing I think anyone should do is communicate that they are troubleshooting an issue. This post will cover why we should communicate then dig into how to put together an… Read more

Welcome to SQL University Troubleshooting Week. For anyone unfamiliar with SQL University, it is a project created by Jorge Segarra (Blog|Twitter) to give people a free way to learn SQL Server from the ground up. The professors at SQL University are bloggers with one or more… Read more

Welcome to SQL University Troubleshooting Week. For anyone unfamiliar with SQL University, it is a project created by Jorge Segarra (Blog|Twitter) to give people a free way to learn SQL Server from the ground up. The professors at SQL University are bloggers with one or more… Read more

I recently debuted a new presentation, “What To Do When It All Goes So Wrong”. The presentation is designed to give Database Administrators a basic overview of the skills they need to handle virtually any crisis that may arise. While the target audience is DBAs, I feel that most IT… Read more

A week or so ago Aaron Nelson (Blog|Twitter) put out a call for help on Twitter looking for anyone that could help with adding autocomplete for looking up an email address to a PowerShell forms application. The original request was to look up the user in… Read more

Last week Jonathan Kehayias (Blog|Twitter) used his blog to publicly call out Thomas LaRock (Blog|Twitter). I am not going to rehash the whole episode here. It is safe to say that while Jonathan made points he felt were correct he went about… Read more

Do you have a favorite line from a holiday movie? Can you change it around slightly to make it SQL related? If so then this is the game for you. Starting this morning and going until we get bored or run out of ideas we will be playing #tsqlHolidayMovieLines on… Read more

What if I told you that you could sign an assembly that your Windows application uses with a certificate, load that certificate into SQL Server and then define rights on that user-assembly combination? The perfect world where a user would have different rights based on the application they are running… Read more

The other day I was asked to provide the port number that a SQL Server instance was listening on. As luck would have it, the log file from the last time SQL Server started had rolled off so I was left with either using remote desktop to log onto the… Read more

Today’s script took a long time to write. The concepts are fairly simple and the resulting script is quite trivial but the lack of easy to find documentation on Reporting Services administration via scripts meant I got to spend a lot of time with my good friend intellisense. In fact,… Read more

Ever since I first heard about the Microsoft Certified Master program I have been interested. The prestige of the certification and the promise of future riches are what draw many people in but for me the big selling point is the challenge. One of the big obstacles I had to… Read more

I know I do!

The trick is to properly manage your VLFs.

What are VLFs? The short anser is that VLF stands for virtual log file. SQL Server database log files are made up of many smaller virtual log files that make it easier for SQL Server to manage the… Read more

Today’s post is a quick one that came out of a conversation on Twitter. To make a long story short, somebody was having trouble with mount points filling up because they were not being caught by their current monitoring script. I offered to look up how my monitoring was doing… Read more

I recently had to track down a rogue process that was failing to log in on one of my servers. It took a bit of fiddling, but eventually I found that you can trace login failed due to missing database errors with Profiler. The trick is to look for User… Read more

There are a handful of scripts out there to compress all of of the objects in your SQL 2008 database using Row, Page or a smart combination of both compression types. This is not one of those scripts.

This script is written to compress all tables in a database without… Read more

I spent a good portion of last weekend restoring databases from backup due to a large release. Nothing went wrong, luckily, but I was practicing in case something did. It goes without saying that I spent a ton of that time sitting in front of my PC wondering when the… Read more

From time to time I hear of DBAs that had to restart the SQL Server service on a 2005 or 2008 server because it had stopped accepting new connections. The thing is that most times those servers did not have to be restarted. If the DBA had logged in via… Read more