G’day,

I recently received a brand new windows 7 virtual machine for my every day work use and one of the first things that I did was install SQL SERVER 2008 developer edition on it.

As I’d expect, this was a pretty straight forward task and before long I had… Read more

G’day,

The recommended way to access SQL SERVER metadata is through the catalog views.

The challenge is to be able to distinguish between the catalog views and the compatibility views, because we always want to use the catalog views rather that the compatibility views.

The compatibility views basically… Read more

G’day,

There’s a lot of mixed opinions around about certifications.

Are they worth while, do they mean anything, do employers value them and the like.

I’m personally in the “certifications are definatly” worth while camp. For a few reasons,

• Certifications test my knowledge to a certain standard and give me…

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G’day,

Running object creation scripts into other environments is a big part of most DBA’s work – especially when a new system is being built in an agile manner. Stored procedures get created and altered all the time.

Very often I used to see code like this

IF EXISTS
(…

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G’day,

Apparently “Meme Monday” was started by Thomas Larock (Blog | Twitter) , as a way for getting people writing. I haven’t been tagged or anything, I just thought that I’d gate crash the party. It was also Tuesday (here in New Zealand), when I seen this weeks… Read more

Hi,

Both the lazy writer process and a checkpoint both push in-memory pages out to disk, however that’s where the similarity ends.

The reason that I’m blogging about that is because I can completely understand how people can confuse these two events – however they are totally different. This post… Read more

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G’day,

There are many things that developers and DBA’s can do to help their relationships run smoothly, most of them are relatively simply things – as this tip is today.

DBA’s often have to track down problems – often performance related – and they tend to use profiler for… Read more

G’day,

A large part of my job involves liaising with developers. I spent the first 8 years of my IT career working as a developer before moving into database administration in 2008. Consequently,  I find this relationship to be one of the easier aspects of my job to manage  -… Read more

G’day,

I’ve blogged about facets before, but I just thought that I’d mention them again, as they came in quite handy today.

I was looking to change the default backup directory of my SQL instance.

Usually, I’d just change the value by editing the registry, either manually or with a… Read more

G’day

There seems to be a lot of articles around at the moment concerning the use of PowerShell.

I think this is great and I’m currently attempting to write a Powershell script for all of the activities that I perform daily on my databases.

However, anybody who has more than… Read more

Hi,

I was recently doing some testing as I thought that I’d experiment with the ghost clean up process.

I found that I needed to enable Trace Flag 661 to disable this process.
So off I went and ran the following code

DBCC TRACEON(661);
GO

I then stated inserting records… Read more

G’day,

I’ve been asked a few times lately to explain what a heap is.

I’m quite happy to do this, but I generally inquire of the person who posed the question, what exactly they think a heap is.

It’s at this point that I seem to mostly get one of… Read more

G’day,

Recently, I was browsing through my database server when suddenly under the “System Stored Procedures” folder of the master database I seen a stored procedure that I knew had been written at my workplace. I knew this stored procedure never shipped with SQL SERVER 2008 and had not been… Read more

G’day,

You’ve probably all noticed that when you right click on a user database object in SSMS object explorer that you get a context menu. One of the options in that context menu gives us the ability to script the object out.

However, try the same thing on an object… Read more

G’day,

I think it would be a fair bet to say that we’ve all used the @@IDENTITY function. It returns the last identity value that was generated by the statement – that’s what books online says.

Note that that statement says absolutely nothing about scope.

Generally, the scope will not… Read more

G’day,

I look after several clustered instances of SQL SERVER. One of the tasks that I do every morning is to check if any of those instances have failed over to a new node. I would prefer to have this monitored automatically, and that’s what this post is about –… Read more

G’day,

Occasionally, I hear things that surprise me. And one of the statements that I’ve heard lately that fits into that category is that if your database files are on a RAID volume that you don’t need backups.

Really!!!

Well, we hopefully all know what RAID stands for – Redundant… Read more

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 In part one, I gave a general overview of some of the things that may affect IT services in the event of a natural disaster, specifically an earthquake.

In this article I will look at how priorities may change and the speed at which they will change and…

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