A Failed Jobs Monitoring System
One DBA's tale of how to monitor jobs for failure and ensure that the DBA is alerted to the fact that there is a problem. (from Feb 2008)
2017-02-02 (first published: 2008-02-05)
23,278 reads
TJay Belt
2009-04-01
5,204 reads
On-Call Duties
What are some of the on-call duties a DBA must perform? TJay Belt talks about them in this new article.
2008-10-27
6,274 reads
A Simple DR Solution
Tjay Belt brings us a quick and easy DR solution that might provide you some protection if you don't have a DR plan and want some lessons learned in this area.
2008-07-31
8,323 reads
Audit Database Changes in the Real World
Tjay Belt brings us a story of how auditing was actually implemented and a discussion of why particular decisions were made.
2008-06-11
9,080 reads
2008-03-27
5,110 reads
sp_GetBackupInfo
This will report all backup activity for all databases, sorted by date, so you see the last backup activity first. You can filter this one by a db name as well, and only see the backup info for said database.
2002-03-07
809 reads
sp_GetLastBackup
This will get the last date a database was backuped. It allows you to report this date on all databases on a server, or pass in a db name, and it'll report the date that db was last backed up
2002-03-07
449 reads
spAddField
spAddField is the proc I use to add all fields to the db in our upgrade scripts. With this proc, you pass it the tablename, fieldname, datatype, and null or not null. This will call spGetFieldsExists and see if the fields exists or not. If it does, spAddField will drop that column. Then it readds […]
2002-03-05
229 reads
spDropField
spDropField does exactly the opposite of spAddField. It checks for existence, then drops it, if it does exist.
2002-03-05
148 reads
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Question of the Day
The Decoded Value
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:
DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!'; DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX); SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000))); SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded)See possible answers