Starting next week, that’s the first week of April, this will be my new office. Well, not really, but I’ll be working for the company that hosts this coaster, Six Flags. I’ll be overseeing all the SQL Server stuff for the entire organization. That means the back… Read more

Argenis Fernandez (blog | twitter) is hosting the latest T-SQL Tuesday and asking about specialization.

For the earlier part of my career I was doing application development while really wanting to do database work. I also learned plenty about systems administration while in college. The variety of the… Read more

I’ve run into a few situations that required examining the existing CLR assemblies on a server. Whether I needed to do a comparison between two versions to make sure they are the same or confirm something in the assembly itself, this script has come in handy. Point it at a… Read more

I really like using typeperf for perfmon counter collection. It allows me to save a collection of counters to monitor and store those readings in a csv file for later analysis. Sometimes I end up running the output through the PAL tool. Unfortunately, the PAL tool generates graphs that… Read more

Several professionals have posted about checking whether or not your processors are running at full speed by using CPU-Z. Some recommendations are to check your servers every couple of months or, if virtual, every time your guest moves. Me being lazy efficient, I’d rather automate having these servers send… Read more

A few weeks ago one of our clustered server nodes blue-screened and when it came back on SQL refused to start. I started digging in and this is what I found in the Event Log: “Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘sqlagent100_msdb_upgrade.sql’ encountered error 200, state… Read more

My favorite and most used feature of the SSMS Tools Pack is the query history. This feature has saved me a lot of time and effort. DBAs where I work are assigned both a desktop for normal day to day operations and a laptop for when we’re at home, meetings,… Read more

As a follow-up to my SERVERPROPERTY() post, this is a quick script to grab all the SESSIONPROPERTY() values from your current session in a table. Useful when you forget what the propertyname options are. Properties obtained from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175001.aspx.

DECLARE @props TABLE (propertyname sysname PRIMARY KEY)
INSERT

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Demo files from my presentation at Dallas Tech Fest 2011.

SQL Server CLR – An Introduction – Dallas Tech Fest 2011

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In a continuation of my previous LOGON TRIGGER post.

A downside to SQL logins is that anyone with the username / password combination can login as that user. This prevents us from knowing who truly logged in and performed some action. It is possible to trace and log everything… Read more

Yesterday I was trying to drop some hypothetical indexes in production against a fairly active table. I started causing blocking so I had the bright idea of disabling the indexes first, then dropping. Well, that didn’t help, even when setting DEADLOCK_PRIORITY to LOW. I ended up waiting until early morning… Read more

I had a need today to disable all of our admin jobs while I moved our admin database to another file location. We didn’t want to get a lot of alerts or job failures during the move, even though it took less than 5 minutes. This script runs best in… Read more

A quick script to grab all the SERVERPROPERTY() values from a SQL instance in a table. Useful when you forget what the propertyname options are. Properties obtained from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174396.aspx.

DECLARE @props TABLE (propertyname sysname PRIMARY KEY)
INSERT INTO @props(propertyname)
SELECT 'BuildClrVersion'
UNION
SELECT 'Collation'

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Yesterday, I was tasked with helping a team move their BizTalk databases to another server. These are my notes for anyone else in this predicament.

In our case we had 6 databases to move:

• BizTalkDTADb
• BizTalkHwsDb
• BizTalkMgmtDb (This is the management database that tells BizTalk where everything else is.)
• BizTalkMsgBoxDb

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Thomas LaRock (Blog | Twitter) has started a community blog series call Meme Monday.

Here’s my entry:
Community is nice, but displaces work if you are not disciplined.

I would tag others, but I think everyone I would have tagged has already posted.

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SQL Saturday #63 – Dallas was a great event. The venue was great, although parking was a little unclear (I had to walk all the way around the building to get in.) Breakfast was good, but I’m always disappointed when there are no breakfast juices, just coffee, cola or water. Read more

I had the opportunity to present my “What Can You Do With PowerShell?” session in Dallas at SQL Saturday #63. Here are the resources for that talk.

So What Can I Do With PowerShell

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The Annoyance

Sometimes when we’re trying to track down a problem and looking through SQL’s Logs we have to dig through hundreds of backup successful events just to find what we’re looking for. Unfortunately, SSMS doesn’t have an exclusion filter when viewing the logs, so I can’t filter… Read more

What is NOLOCK?

NOLOCK is a table hint for SQL Server that tells the engine to not take locks and ignore any locks when querying that table. This is equivalent to the READUNCOMMITTED table hint.

From MSDN:

Specifies that dirty reads are allowed. No shared locks are issued to…

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Overview

Today was the fifth and final day of the Internals & Performance immersion event. I have really enjoyed learning from not only Paul and Kimberly, but my classmates as well. There were many smart people in that room and hearing each others’ perspectives is a part of the class… Read more