I’ve always found clusters a pain in the neck.  For my latest pain I just spent the last 2 days debugging DBMail on an instance on a cluster.  To the best of my ability everything appeared set up correctly but when I tried a test email it wouldn’t send.  The… Read more

A couple of days ago I read Steve Jones’ blog on creating a user defined table type.  This reminded me that I had just recently been reading about TVPs (Table Valued Parameters) which require user defined table types.  Steve wondered about how useful the concept of user defined table… Read more

I recently turned on OPTIMIZE FOR AD HOC WORKLOADS for the first time on one of my servers.  When I went back and looked at sys.dm_exec_cached_plans the next day I had a bit of a shock.  There were over 9000 compiled plans with only one use.  I had thought that… Read more

As a database administrator I get lots of security requests. “Please grant me read authority on this table, write on that table, and the ability to juggle.” (In case anyone is interested the last can be granted by adding the user to the db_juggling role.)  I’m going to guess a… Read more

My manager has been quietly laughing under his breath at me for years. Usually because I much prefer queries and system tables/functions to using the GUI. I’ll look for the table I want in sys.tables, stored procedures in sys.procedures etc. This preference is probably why, when I found this little… Read more