Most DBAs have seen those nice clear red errors in the results pane. And I’m sure most DBAs have noticed the line number clearly displayed after the state.

Here is a fun test to try. Execute the following script:

PRINT 'test'
SELECT TOP 10 * FROM sys.databases
SELECT @@VERSION
DECLARE…

Dynamic SQL is one of my favorite tools in the DBA toolbox. I’m big on automation and dynamic SQL can be very helpful in automating processes across multiple databases, multiple instances etc. There are several flavors of dynamic SQL and each is useful under different circumstances. I should point out… Read more

We recently added responsibility for ~80 more servers to our team. This means that my team-mates and I are working on servers that we aren’t familiar with. And that means that we don’t know where the backups are stored. So yesterday when I had to do an ad-hoc backup for… Read more

Did you know you can copy and paste connection managers in SSIS? While I haven’t found this a huge benefit with OLE DB connections it can come in very handy for flat file connections. Here is an example I ran across recently.

The task:
Create a SSIS package to unload… Read more

Logins are not Users. It’s a pretty easy concept but one that seems to give a lot of people problems. So let’s explore it a little bit.

Logins, sql and windows, are stored in sys.server_principals and are server specific. They are assigned server level permissions and can be added to… Read more