Taking some of my own advice. I’m off today and tomorrow, as well as Monday for Labor Day. Across this 5 day weekend, I have a number of chores to tackle, including trying to build another horse shelter before winter.

However I will look to recharge and relax a… Read more

Chicago is a neat down. My first PASS Summit was in Chicago, back in 1999. My wife joined me with an infant son, and we took in the last baseball game of the season that year at Comisky Park. This year I was hoping to take in a game… Read more

This is one of the things in my Encryption Primer presentation that I don’t demo. It’s really easy to do, and it’s rather mechanical, so I just show the image that has the steps from MSDN and leave it at that.

However there are a few things I wanted to… Read more

I love San Francisco. It was one of the cities that I thought I might live in someday. My kids have all been there multiple times, exploring museums, crossing the amazing Golden Gate Bridge, visting Muir Woods and more. When I heard SQL in the City was coming to S.F,… Read more

The last time I was in Austin was last year, for a weekend trip with my wife to see Stevie Wonder and Kanye West (on separate days) at the Austin Music Festival. My wife and I have been trying to see Stevie Wonder for over ten years, and we… Read more

This is nice, a year long safety pilot from the University of Michigan. Quite extensive, using 3,000 cars to gather data. I don’t know what they’ll get out of this, and if you read the comments, there’s all kinds of speculation, but it’s a good idea, in my opinion. Read more

Suppose you want to stop using a DDL trigger for a short period of time, such as the login trigger I created recently. If you want to disable an index, you use

ALTER INDEX xxx DISABLE

That doesn’t work for triggers. The ALTER TRIGGER syntax is used for changing code. Read more

I just booked my tickets for New York City. I’m coming into the city on Sept 27, at 2pm, with just enough time to get to my hotel, drop my bags, and then hit Central Park for a run. I love to run, and Central Park is great. It’s on… Read more

I’ve been giving a Prepare for When Disaster Strikes talk at SQL in the City this year, and it’s designed to get you to think about problems before they happen and take steps to mitigate issues. It’s important at work, but it’s also important at home.

If you read the… Read more

If you’re like me, you take advantage of the default backup paths in SQL Server. It makes my code cleaner, and if I need to move the instance somewhere else, all my code works. No pathing issues.

A certificate backup might look like this for me:

USE master
;
go…

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After reading about the Amazon/Apple attack this morning, I grabbed a second cup of coffee and went in search of a monitor cord. We’d given a monitor to a friend recently, which was the one rarely used for the Home Server. It wasn’t a big deal since we always log… Read more

It’s T-SQL Tuesday time again, and this is my post for #33. The host is Mike Fal and his topic is Trick Shots, which is an interesting one. I’m not a tricky guy, and I tend to lean towards common, practical approaches to problems. I’m not sure this post… Read more

My standing desk experiment has worked out well. I have gotten used to standing there and I’ve slowly found places for my coffee, water, phone, and other things that I use at my desk. I still need to work on the keyboard/mouse stand, but that’s a future project. Today I… Read more

I saw this question posted the other day and thought it was a great idea.

I haven’t been a big schema user in the past, but I see the value of excluding some schemas. CDC for sure, but I know some people have an ETL schema, which is much nicer… Read more

In a recent post I talked about how to create a DDL trigger. You’d think to drop that trigger, I’d run this:

DROP trigger CatchLogins

That returns me this nice message:

Msg 3701, Level 11, State 5, Line 1

Cannot drop the trigger ‘CatchLogins’, because it does not exist… Read more

I was running some code the other day and was surprised by the result.

DECLARE @tmp TABLE (myID INT IDENTITY,MyChar VARCHAR(200))

INSERT INTO @tmp(MyChar) Values('Apple')
INSERT INTO @tmp(MyChar) Values('Peach')
INSERT INTO @tmp

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This is really scary. Someone being sued for downloading a porn movie illegally. I have nothing against porn, and I certainly think that downloading stuff that’s a copyright violation shouldn’t be mainstream as in Amazon giving away movies for free without compensating owners of the copyrights.

Setting that aside,… Read more

Are there things you need to make sure are running when your SQL Agent starts? Did you know that you can run a job when the Agent starts?

I haven’t often used this, but there are cases where it was handy. In one system I administered, we wanted very fast… Read more

Excellent: Dilbert on data analysts

The best part is the last quote: I like how you punctuate your ignorance with certainty.

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