Every so often, usually in the middle of the night or on a holiday weekend, an identity column will hit the maximum size for it’s data type and stop allowing new values to be inserted into the table. It goes without saying that an identity column with enough activity to… Read more

Can Deadlocks be Resolved by Adding an Index? Yes. Really, I’m not kidding. Here, I’ll show you how.

First, let me set the scene: One of the applications I support has had issues with deadlocks for some time now. The deadlocks are really a result of design issues that it… Read more

Not long ago Microsoft announced a new product called Azure AKA “SQL Server in the Cloud”. I have to say that when I first heard about the product I was skeptical. The problem I had is that I already have servers, lots of them in fact. I struggled to find… Read more

Working in a technical field has it’s ups and downs. One of the more common annoyances I run into is people that can either not explain what they mean in simple terms or that choose not to in order to appear knowledgeable. I still have a long way to go… Read more

The theme for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is indexes so it seemed like the perfect excuse to blog about a script that I have written to see what choices for fill factors on indexes actually does to the structure of those indexes. I have to give special thanks to Brent… Read more

I do not usually post a quote of the day but since this is my own quote I decided to share it.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Make it yours, own the day. Repeat tomorrow. This has been your wake up call.

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Yesterday I attended an internal training course on social networking. The class was targeted toward the 100 level, but like most classes had at least 1 new thing for everyone to take away. The big takeaway for me was that I must disclose that I am employed by CDW when… Read more

Today’s post is one that I have been debating on whether to publish for a while. The purpose of the stored procedure I am sharing is to move SSIS packages stored via SQL Server Storage from one server SQL 2005 server to another in a way that can easily be… Read more

Mladen Prajdic (Blog|Twitter) recently announced that the newest version of SSMS Tools Pack is coming out and I am excited.

Why am I excited?

Well, I am glad you asked.

I am excited because it will allow me to define my window colors in SQL Management… Read more

I recently finished taking down a bunch of servers that I was using to scale out my environment by forcing read only connections off of my main read-write servers. To make a long story short, hardware advances and the additional diagnostic information in SQL 2005 allowed me to consolidate to… Read more

Introduction

What is an Easy Way to Return Results from a CLR Stored Procedure? The question sounds simple enough but yet when I went searching for answers I could not find it. This post describes a helper class that I came up with to handle returning values from a CLR… Read more

Introduction

A while back I had a developer come to me complaining that every time they ran a large delete statement on a certain database the delete would fail with a message claiming the database was full. My first instinct was that they were doing something wrong so I asked… Read more

Introduction

Today’s script is one that I wrote based on the logic outlined in this post by Paul Randal (Blog|Twitter). This script is written for SQL 2000 but, as Paul notes, the logic will work on SQL 2005.

The Script

This stored procedure stays pretty true… Read more

Paul Randal (Blog|Twitter) recently kicked off this meme by listing the 5 things he thinks SQL Server should get rid of. Michelle Ufford (Blog|Twitter) tagged me on her response, so here is my list of 5 things I think SQL Server should… Read more

Introduction

Today’s script is one that I had not planned on blogging so soon but since Paul Randal just talked about moving SQL Server files around for TechNet Magazine, it seemed like a good time to break this one out.

The Script

This script is a little different in… Read more

Introduction

This morning I set out to get some information about getting started in PowerShell for a coworker. Rather than spend a bunch of time searching for different sites I threw the question out to the SQL Community on Twitter via #SqlHelp. The response was so overwhelming that I… Read more

Introduction

Today’s post is a continuation in my on-going effort to document all of the scripts I use to manage my environment. To date it has been a great exercise both in getting things written down and in getting feedback from others on better ways I could be doing things.… Read more

Introduction

Today’s post is going to be a quick one to get back in the saddle again. I have been on an involuntary hiatus from blogging due to production issues. Things are getting better so it seems like time to get back to blogging.

The script for today is one… Read more

Introduction

I recently blogged about a Stored Procedure to Sequentially Run SQL Agent Jobs and have been meaning to blog about this script as a follow-up because this is very helpful for converting from SQL job schedules to sequential job schedules while still having a back out path. The question… Read more

Introduction

I am one of those people that believe that anything worth doing is worth having a script to do it. Setting the Max Degree of Parallelism is no exception. In this post I will go through the script I use as well as the metrics I watch to make… Read more