Today I discovered, from a post on the forums and a follow up dig into BOL that sp_change_users_login is to be depreciated in future versions of SQL Server and the new ALTER USER should be used instead.  Now let me make it clear here, sp_change_users_login is still available in SQL… Read more

I have seen many forum posts asking how do you schedule backups for SQL Express databases and the answers always have similar responses that go something like:

“There is no SQL agent in Express…the only way to backup databases on a schedule is to write a script and call it… Read more

I took control of a new server recently and noticed that Tempdb was not configured to best practice. It was not on its own drive and it consisted of one data file and one log file…The server had a couple of cores, I’m not sure how relevant this is anymore… Read more

For those people who like to use the Activity Monitor in the SQL Server Management Studio GUI instead of, or along with,  sp_who, sp_who2 and DMVs in SQL Server, it is not where you left it in SQL Server 2005.

To view the activity monitor interface in SQL Server 2008… Read more

I recently posted a couple of  scripts that backup all databases on your SQL Server instance to disk with a date and time stamp, so you know from the file name when it was taken and hopefully helps you identify how useful those backup are to you. The second script… Read more

My last post showed a little script that I use for taking full backups of all my databases on an Instance.

This script below will take a transaction log backup of all your database in full recovery mode, again it can be used in conjunction with the SQL agent to… Read more

We all know the importance of taking regular backups of our SQL Server databases. This is a useful little script that I use to take a full backup of my databases on an instance. It can be used in combination with the SQL Agent to schedule:

DECLARE @DBName varchar(255)

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This is a short post on enabling file streaming. I have read a few sources that cover the same topic but I like to write about these things to reinforce my knowledge. If you are interested in these other useful resources and to be honest this is where I learned… Read more

Recently I wrote a short post  on the default trace in SQL Server. You can read that here. In this post I am going to discuss the advantages of a server side trace over the SQL Server profiler GUI. I’ll look at an easy method for creating server side traces,… Read more

This post is the second post in my series about Database mirroring. For part one is titled Configuring Database Mirroring in SQL Server. I believe that high availability is the primary reason people mirror their important production databases. Depending on your situation there can be some other benefits of using… Read more

“IO IO, It’s off to disk we go!” was in Mike Walsh’s blog post that introduced this TSQL Tuesday and I thought this would be an ideal opportunity for me to get my feet wet with a TSQL Tuesday contribution of my own, my very first. This kind of got… Read more

I plan on writing a series of posts on database mirroring, this is the first. Database Mirroring is a new feature of SQL Server 2005 and I have been configuring and testing it lately so I thought I would write a short post to document what I have learned.

This… Read more

I have taken some time off this week, I have been to the beach with my two golden retriever puppies. My one dog, Seth, hates the car so we were a little concerned that he wouldn’t like it. After a couple of puppy travel sickness tablets though he calmed right… Read more

I got my copy of MVP deep dives earlier this month and have been making good progress in reading some of the chapters. Its not a start to finish book and by that I mean you can really read any chapter in any order you like. Me being me, I… Read more