A couple weeks ago a user complained that on one of our development databases, one of the views he was linking to via Access was missing some of the columns.  There were no permissions issues and the columns all showed up properly if they looked at the view via SSMS;… Read more

Because this was a problem that Google was zero help on and I did find a couple other people afflicted with it, I figured I’d write a post about it. 

The issue was this.  I add a table to replication (SQL Server 2005).  The option to replicate DDL changes is… Read more

This is a technique I’m sure many people are already using in their environments.  Instead of using the actual name of your SQL Server as the name of the linked server that you call, use a generic name.  For instance.  If you have a couple of servers named SQLSales02 and… Read more

Here are a couple more SSMS tricks I’ve stumbled upon recently.  Both involve the functionality of registered servers.  If you really only deal with 1 or 2 servers in your environment, these probably won’t help you out much.  But for those of us who have to deal with a large… Read more

This is one that I figured most everyone would know, but repeatedly over the past couple weeks in my office, I was surprised to find that many people had never seen this before.  If you just click on objects in the object explorer, you can’t hold shift to select multiple… Read more

Most of us like things that make our lives easier.  When they’re free, it’s just that much sweeter.  I would have sworn I’d done a post or two on SSMS Tools Pack before, but apparently this one has slipped through the cracks.  No Longer!

SSMS Tools Pack is a free…

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This isn’t exactly the best thing since bread (or even sliced bread for that matter), but I figured I’d share this as I haven’t seen it written about in many places and I find it quite handy on a regular basis.  If you hold down the ALT key in SSMS… Read more

Last year I posted professional goals along with quite a few other bloggers and it helped to keep me somewhat focused on them (for at least the beginning of the year).  I am going to do so again in the hopes that I do even better this year.  My goals… Read more

So… this is late.  And I missed my q3 goals review all together.  Oh well, not much I can do to fix that now other than push on and try to do better next time.  For the first two quarters, I was looking pretty good for completing my goals, but… Read more

So, after a rather hectic few months, I’m finally crawling back out of the hole I’ve been occupying and getting back to blogging. This Saturday (September 18th, 2010), I’ll be headed to the SQL Saturday here and am very excited about getting to put a face to the names of… Read more

First, I wanted to post a reminder that the July SCSUG meeting has been moved to this coming Monday, July 12th in order to accommodate the schedule of our speaker, David Pless.  As normal, the meeting will take place at the SCCU HQ on Wickham Road.  This will be David’s… Read more

I saw a Blog post by Grant Fritchey (Blog | Twitter) a couple days ago on using Geospatial data in SSRS 2008 R2.  I think this is incredibly cool and it reminded me of something I wanted to share about my own recent experiences with geospatial data.  My… Read more

This is a bit later than usual as the meeting was a week ago now, but I wanted to post it anyways to thank SCSUG member Don King for stepping in on short notice to fill a hole in our speaker schedule.  Even though he didn't have a lot of… Read more

Another quarter gone, and unfortunately I’m still looking about the same on goal progress.  Still looking good on Blog posts and networking, still a bit behind on forum posts and still abysmally behind on the Learning goals. 

On the bright side, the learning goals are something that I can knock… Read more

In this edition of T-SQL Tuesday, Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter) asks us what our favorite new feature of SQL 2008 or 2008 R2 is.  I've decided to focus on the T-SQL and query writing enhancements of 2008.  Before I do so though, let me preface… Read more

Recently on the SSC forums, someone asked about how to measure the money in an actual dollar figure that they have saved the company with their performance tuning.  I've often struggled with this myself, and so I started thinking about it a bit deeper.  I started to respond in the… Read more

Glenn Berry (Blog) writes a lot of queries to extract information from the system DMV’s.  One of them in particular I found extremely helpful in fixing some of the issues in my system.  I took his query (the CTE at the top) and added some text manipulation to… Read more

This coming Thursday is the SCSUG meeting.  This is no normal meeting.  Instead of the standard format of pizza/socialization followed by a single speaker who will cover a topic for 1.5-2 hours, we are going to have not 1… not 2… but 6 speakers.  Each speaker will cover a topic… Read more

Whew!  So I've been super busy the past week and a half upgrading our production server from SQL 2000 to SQL 2008 and haven't had time for any new posts.  Finally starting to see everything calm down again though and running smoother than ever before.  I had hoped to do… Read more

This post is a T-SQL Tuesday Entry, hosted this week by Aaron Nelson on the topic of “Reporting”.  (It got a little long.  Ordinarily I’d have broken this up into a series and fleshed out individual pieces a bit better, but this touches on most of the general points) Read more