OK for my next DB2 trick and remaining off the path of the righteous for the time being we will look at creating a DB2 database. I assume that you have the DB2 RDBMS software installed, you can get a free 'community' copy of the express edition, follow this link… Read more

This is a little bit off topic for me but on Friday I was asked to look at a DB2 instance and sort out some issues with the CPU maxing out. Make no mistake I’m no DB2 expert, but I have done some small pieces of work on it previously,… Read more

It is generally recommended that 'lock pages in memory' be enabled for your SQL Servers to prevent the OS paging out SQL Server memory.

how do you do this?

Well, the answer is straight forward...If you have SQL Server Enterprise Edition:

You allocate the service account running SQL Server the… Read more

On the 19th/20th May (last month) the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) held its second 24 hours of PASS event . '24 hours of PASS' consists of 24 individual hour long meetings/presentations/training session all with a SQL Server 2008 R2 theme, held online and delivered by some of the… Read more

Recently I was installing Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition onto a virtual machine (VM) I was setting up to carry out some testing when I encountered the following error:

"The unattended answer file contains an invalid product key. Either remove the invalid key or provide a valid product key… Read more

Well the World Cup is now half way through, 32 games played, 32 games to go. The talk here in the UK has focused around England their poor start. Two games played, one goal scored, one goal conceded, two draws, no wins, no losses, and they seem to lurch from… Read more

This Thursday gone, (June 18th) I went to a hotel near Heathrow airport in London for what was titled a “SQL Server MasterClass” and I was not disappointed.

I have attended several taught MCP SQL Server training courses over the years and several conferences including SQL Bits and this MasterClass… Read more

Read more

This day only comes around once in every four years, we've all been waiting for it for months. It's been in the news and media, there has been a great deal written about qualification, preparation and selection and now with all that done and dusted its finally arrived...The start of… Read more

You can probably tell from some of my more recent posts that I have been doing some work lately on SQL Server 2008. I have also recently (the last two months) upgraded my work desktop to Windows 7. As a result of this of this, and the continued migration away… Read more

It's that time of the month again, time for the next round of T-SQL Tuesday posts. This month is being hosted by Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter) and we are blogging about new features in SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Plenty of scope then as… Read more

I recently installed a new SQL Server 2008 instance on a brand new Windows 2008 R2. When I tried to connect to said instance using Management studio on my desktop i received the following error message:

"A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The… Read more

Recently I have been installing a new SQL Server 2008 instance on Vmware vSphere based  virtual server, the OS was Windows 2008 R2. I have done this several times before and I don't recall ever getting this issue. Seeing as it took me a short while to figure out what… Read more

I haven’t written anything technical or SQL Server related for that matter on my blog for a few of weeks. Mainly because I spent a couple of  weeks in Florida celebrating my birthday. I did take my laptop on my holidays mainly because we booked everything flight, car, hotel etc… Read more

Read more