SQLServerPedia Syndication
Recreating Tables with User Defined Types
I just ran into an odd little problem. And of course, solving it turned out to be kind of fun. Since I don’t do a ton of development work, this little challenge took some thinking. We’re building a little datamart, and I want to pull a few tables from the source database onto a different [...]
Backup Sanity Check
One of my pet peeves is when an application thinks its smarter than its DBA. Our helpdesk system was occasionally complaining that the database hadn’t been backed up in the past 24 hours. And our helpdesk manager was understandably concerned. That’s when I started doing some digging. My backup script was occasionally skipping databases that [...]
Failing the Smell Test
In addition to being a DBA, I’m a bit of a travel geek. I have a great love of airplanes, aviation, and travel. Today, I was looking at flights and saw something that made me think that it was a total violation of constraints. Just looking at this made me cringe. US Airways flight 0729 [...]
Migration
Tomorrow, my company moves into our new facility. It’s about 1.5 miles down the road from our old facilities. We were in two different buildings about 100 yards apart. Now, we’re moving into a single building. We’re a technology company who makes networking software and quite a bit of the hardware that runs our software [...]
New Project: Aviation Statistics
Most technology professionals have a lab or test environment where they can work and play. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. Sure, I have a test environment, but it’s only for my ERP system. And my company is really particular about software licensing. I could never set up a test environment that wasn’t explicitly related [...]
Free Lunch – Without Lunch
The old adage is that there is no free lunch. Every once in a while, a free event comes up that’s a great use of time at no cost. Today was one such example. My friend Brent Ozar presented a virtual training class sponsored by Quest Software. Today’s topic was “Performance Tuning & Troubleshooting with [...]
My Updated SQL Server 2005 Install Checklist
If you’ve been following me lately (either my blog or Twitter), you know that I’m in the process of building up some new servers on a new SAN for a big database consolidation. After the first server, I had a pretty good checklist. Brent Ozar has a pretty fantastic checklist that I stole a few [...]
Server Builds
I’m building a new server. Actually, I’m building two. We just bought a new pair of SANS (one production, one DR) and are doing a consolidation project with our databases. Each DB server will live on its own VMWare host. We’re virtualizing so that we can utilize VMWare’s clustering. It also gives us the flexibility [...]
Why Database Names Matter
There is a reason users shouldn’t be allowed to name their own databases. Actually, there are probably several thousand reasons. I have a new one for you–It makes my life more difficult. Lets say you work for a company called Acme. And lets say your manufacturing people created an in-house Microsoft Access application with a [...]
Rookie Mistakes: Named Instance
I hate rookie mistakes. I hate them even more when I’m the one making them. My coworker was installing Microsoft OCS Server, and he said that he needed a SQL instance, and he told me what the instance needed to be named. Since we already had a SQL server dedicated to this project, I created [...]