Neil Jacobson


Technical Article

Stored Procedure to read tape backup log

If you need to check that the tape back of your database backup files was successful, you would generally read the errorlog for the backup software.If you are just interested in today's results or a particular day's log it can be a pain to get.  You could have a shortcut on the desktop or you […]

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2002-02-10

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Technical Article

Run a blackbox trace

There is a script for setting up a blackbox trace on SQL 2000 described by Kalen Delaney in "Inside SQL Server 2000". Since I can never remember where to look it up I wrote this simple stored procedure to run the blackbox trace when I need it. This should be used with caution as it […]

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2002-02-05

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Technical Article

Get list of files from dir and put in table

This stored procedure reads the file names from a directory and stores just the names in a given table. It returns also the number of files present. The sp uses xp_cmdshell and so permissions are restricted to sysadmins and SQLAgentCmdExec. You can test with the following: Create Table ##tmp2 ( fldx nvarchar(255) ) Declare @FilePath […]

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2002-02-01

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Technical Article

Stored procedure to expose information for a file

I wanted to be able to use info about an operating system file in TSQL. So I wrote this stored procedure that uses the special stored procedures xp_fileexist and xp_getfiledetails. This can tell if a file or folder exists, and if it is a file what is its size, created date and time, last written […]

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2002-02-01

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Question of the Day

The Ending Substring

In Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2025, if I run this, what is returned?

SELECT '[' + SUBSTRING('Steve Jones', 7) + ']'

See possible answers