A 2015 full of DLM

After SQL Saturday Pordenone, I’ll keep speaking about DLM (aka ALM on databases) during the following events:
PASS Italian Virtual Chapter, April 14. I’ll demonstrate...

Combating the CXPacket Wait Type

Often, when DBAs are looking at total wait statistics on the servers they manage, CXPacket is at or near the top of...

Configure SQL Server Agent using SMO

Saw this on twitter and thought I would throw it up on the blog. Easier than responding on twitter.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo") | Out-Null;

$SQLServerInstance...

Exam Prep 70-463: SSIS Transactions and Checkpoints

This post is part of a series on this blog that will help me, and hopefully you, pass exam 70-463: Implementing...

Excel Tip #22: Combo Charts – Out of the Box Functionality

As I mentioned in my original post, Exploring Excel 2013 as Microsoft’s BI Client, I will be posting tips regularly...

Get-DiskSpace

My cheap and dirty PowerShell script for dumping the disk space usage for a Windows machine. It was originally some...

Gotcha! PowerShell Array Initialization, Difference between PowerShell 2.0 and 4.0

I like to initialize my arrays by strongly typing my variable as an array, and setting it to null. PowerShell...

My Specialty

So I was reading the following blog post by Brent Ozar and I think it finally hit me right between the...

The Basic TRY..CATCH

Have you written a TRY..CATCH statement in T-SQL? I hadn’t done it for most of my career, since the construct...

The shaky bug in SSIS

You may or may not have noticed it after installing SQL Server 2012: the designer interface in Visual Studio 2010/2012...