All this talk about code books and elaborate schemes for generating one-off passwords sounds like overkill. If a tornado should strike your company headquarters, I hope you have a backup...

If you're an employee or sub-contractor, then you can (and should) acknowledge the need for external expertise, but that decision is ultimately out of your hands.

I'd much rather have the production control team notify me that a script failed to...

One other thing I'd like to add about deploying ad-hoc change scripts; I also wrap the DML or procedure calls in a transaction and add assertions on the expected number...

In the past, whenver a "data fix" was required in production; a change order was created, and I'd write a T-SQL script which would go though the normal version control,...

Ukon (5/28/2011)

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Hello again! I agree, using Linq with stored procedures, I believe would work quite nicely. I have no objection to that at all. I was only concerned regarding the...

You can bind LINQ to stored procedures, but it would involve more coding. As a compromise you could offer to create a collection of views for use by their application....

sqldba_icon (5/23/2011)

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This job runs once everyday. I have nailed it down to a select statement which has the issue. So if i run this select first time, it will take...

Managing backups has never been my role, so I'm not too familiar with the technicals of how the various 3rd party solutions manage the keys. My question is: Does the...

As already suggested, look at the query execution plan to know what happending. To help things, I'd suggest inner joining that table SaveSets instead of using a sub-select in the...

Lawrence Moore (5/23/2011)

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Hi Eric,

Many thanks for your post.

It is true that DMVs offer lots of useful information, some of which could be applied for requirements discussed in my article.

However, DMVs...

virtualjosh (5/23/2011)

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I use system tables to see if the table has been updated:

SELECT @expiration_dt = [modify_date]

FROM [mydb].[sys].[tables]

WHERE [name] = 'mytable'

If I detect @expiration_dt to be newer than my stored...

SQL Server maintains statistics, which includes counts and timestamps, whenever table indexes are updated. This meta data can be queried from an interesting data management view called sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats. For some...

Just show up for their next monthly meeting.

http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters.aspx

The most obvious way would be a SQL Profiler trace. The TextData column of the SQL:BatchCompleted event class will give you the StartTime and name of the procedure call and...