One of my all-time favorite times of the year happens to be the Christmas Season. I enjoy the season because it is supposed to remind us to try and be better people. And for me, it does help. In all honesty, it should be a better effort year round, but this is a good time of year to try and get back on track and to try and focus more on other more important things.

For me, one of the more important things is to try and help others. Focusing on other people and their needs helps them but also helps one’s self. It is because of the focus on others that I enjoy, not just Christmas Day, but also the 12 Days of Christmas.

The 12 Days of Christmas is about giving for 12 Days. Though, in this day and age, most view it as a span of 12 Days in which they are entitled to receive gifts. If we are giving for a mere 12 Days and not focusing on receiving, then wouldn’t we all be just a little bit happier? I know that when I focus more on the giving I am certainly happier.

Giving

In the spirit of the 12 Days of Christmas and Giving, I have a 12 Day series that I generally try to do each Holiday Season. The series will generally begin on Christmas day to align with the actual 12 Days of Christmas (rather than the adopted tradition of ending on Christmas). This also means that the series will generally end on the celebration of “Twelfth Night” which is January 5th.

Each annual series will include several articles about SQL Server and have a higher goal of trying to learn something more about SQL Server. Some articles may be deep technical dives, while others may prove to be more utilitarian with a script or some functionality that can be quickly put to use and frequently used. Other articles may just be for fun. In all, there will be several articles which I hope will bring some level of use for those that read while they strive to become better at this thing called SQL Server.

This page will serve as a landing page for each of the annual series and will be updated as new articles are added.

2017

1. XE Permissions – 25 December 2017
2. Best New(ish) SSMS Feature – 26 December 2017
3. XE System Messages – 27 December 2017
4. Correlate Trace and XE Events – 28 December 2017
5. Audit Domain Group and User Permissions – 29 December 2017
6. An Introduction to Templates – 30 December 2017
7. Failed to Create the Audit File – 31 December 2017
8. Correlate SQL Trace and Actions – 1 January 2018
9. Dynamics AX Event Session – 2 January 2018
10. Sharepoint Diagnostics and XE – 3 January 2018
11. Change Default Logs Directory – 4 January 2018
12. TBA

2015

1. Failed – 25 December 2015
2. Failed – 26 December 2015
3. Failed – 27 December 2015
4. Failed – 28 December 2015
5. Failed – 29 December 2015
6. Log Files from Different Source – 30 December 2015
7. Customize XEvent Log Display – 31 December 2015
8. Filtering Logged Data – 1 January 2016
9. Hidden GUI Gems – 2 January 2016
10. Failed – 3 January 2016
11. Failed – 4 January 2016
12. A Day in the Stream – 5 January 2016

2013

1. Las Vegas Invite – 25 December 2013
2. SAN Outage – 26 December 2013
3. Peer to Peer Replication – 27 December 2013
4. Broken Broker – 28 December 2013
5. Peer Identity – 29 December 2013
6. Lost in Space – 30 December 2013
7. Command N Conquer – 31 December 2013
8. Ring in the New Year – 1 January 2014
9. Queries Going Boom – 2 January 2014
10. Retention of XE Session Data in a Table – 3 January 2014
11. Purging syspolicy – 4 January 2014
12. High CPU and Bloat in Distribution – 5 January 2014

2012 (pre-Christmas)

1. Maint Plan Logs – 13 December 2012
2. Service Broker Out of Control – 14 December 2012
3. Backup, Job and Mail History Cleanup – 15 December 2012
4. Exercise for msdb – 16 December 2012
5. Table Compression – 17 December 2012
6. Maintenance Plan Gravage – 18 December 2012
7. Runaway Jobs – 19 December 2012
8. SSRS Schedules – 20 December 2012
9. Death and Destruction, err Deadlocks – 21 December 2012
10. Virtual Storage – 22 December 2012
11. Domain Setup – 23 December 2012
12. SQL Cluster on Virtual Box – 24 December 2012