I’m leaving soon for an exciting journey with a thrilling destination – my first SQL Saturday. So I decided to do it right and I’m taking the Amtrak Acela Express from Boston to New York. I love New York! If you’re headed to SQL Saturday #39, and you love database design, I invite you to come to my session on Temporal Database Designs – how to…
This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Aaron Nelson of SQLVariations . Aaron has picked a really fantastic topic: Reporting . Reporting is a lot more than just SSRS. Whether or not you realize it, you deal with all sorts of reports every day. Server up-time reports. Application activity reports. And even DMVs, which as Aaron points out are…
Using the Server Management Objects (SMO) library, you don’t even need to have the SQL Server 2008 PowerShell Provider to read the SQL Server Error Logs – in fact, you can use regular old everyday PowerShell. Keep in mind you will need the SMO libraries – which can be installed separately or by installing the Client Tools from the SQL…
Last week Microsoft announced a new licensing schema for SQL Server 2012. If you are interested in an extensive discussion of the new licensing scheme, Denny Cherry wrote a great blog post about that. I’d like to comment about the new BI Edition license. Teo Lachev already commented about the numbers and I agree with him. I generally…
It's time for the fourth T-SQL Tuesday , managed this time by Mike Walsh . I almost missed this deadline completely, since I didn't see the announcement at all. I wrote to Adam to ask if there even was an event this month, since I wasn't able to get into my own blog site ( www.SQLBlog.com ) for a week, and he pointed me to Mike's…
Using the Server Management Objects (SMO) library, you don’t even need to have the SQL Server 2008 PowerShell Provider to read the SQL Server Error Logs – in fact, you can use regular old everyday PowerShell. Keep in mind you will need the SMO libraries – which can be installed separately or by installing the Client Tools from…
SQL Trace (or SQL Profiler) is no doubt an excellent tool. But its filtering capability is rather primitive, and is very poorly documented. Here is a request that is simple and seems to be rather reasonable. Create a trace to filter for the following: 1. All the update/delete statements, and 2. All the select/insert statements…
This weekend I will be speaking at the NYC SQL Saturday . The whole event was supposed to be BI focused but now the schedule shows a lot of non BI stuff as well. I will be presenting SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Programming , one of my favorite topics to present on. It seems that the event if fully booked. I'll be coming…
Do you know where SQL Server is installed - everywhere it is installed? Do you really know where SQL Server is installed? Are you looking for a tool that will help you discover any rogue instances so you can better manage these instances? The Beta 2 for the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now open. Join…
Microsoft is working on a new Windows Azure service called “Trust Services”. Trust Services takes a certificate you upload and uses it to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data in the cloud. Of course, like any security service, there’s a bit more to it than that. I’ll give you a quick overview of how you can use this product to…
Great to see that our friend Ola Hallengren has updated his maintenance utility scripts to deal with SQL Server 2008 R2. These scripts are highly regarded, particularly given the price: free ! You'll find them here: http://ola.hallengren.com/Versions.html Ola noted that the main change from 2008 is that backup compression is…
Do you know where SQL Server is installed - everywhere it is installed? Do you really know where SQL Server is installed? Are you looking for a tool that will help you discover any rogue instances so you can better manage these instances? The Beta 2 for the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now open.…
Paul Randal ( blog | twitter ) started a new meme last night with his blog post " What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of? " A few bloggers have posted their top 5 lists, so here is mine. Creating Foreign Keys without mentioning Indexes This is probably a performance tuning consultants favorite. I know that Greg…
The other day I was working with a client on an application they were changing to a hybrid architecture – some data on-premise and other data in SQL Azure and Windows Azure Blob storage. I had them make a couple of corrections - the first was that all communications to SQL Azure need to be encrypted. It’s a simple…
I was very happy to dive in into SQL Bits VII. Several interesting presentations, interesting concepts, advices and most of all interesting people. Some things actually disturb me. 1. the outlook of all presentations. I would recommend to have standardized outlook of all presentations for each of the presenter.…
As one of the developers of SQL Monitor, I often get requests passed on by our support people from customers who are looking to dip into SQL Monitor’s own data repository, in order to pull out bits of information that they’re interested in. Since there’s clearly interest out there in playing around directly…
I am involved in a project that is implementing SharePoint 2013 on virtual machines hosted in Azure. The back end data tier consists of two Azure VMs running SQL Server 2012, with the SharePoint databases contained in an AlwaysOn Availability Group. I used this "Tutorial: AlwaysOn Availability Groups…
In a perfect world, there would be no software bugs. Developers would always test their code. QA would find any scenarios and bugs the developers hadn’t already thought of. Regression tests would be complete and flawless. But alas, we can only afford to pay mere humans here, so we will have bugs from time…
Developers have long since had to context switch between two IDEs, Visual Studio for application code development and SQL Server Management Studio for database development. While this is accepted, especially given the richness of the database development feature set in SSMS, loading a separate tool can…
In continuation to SQL_Server_2008_R2 release date announcement you can access a complete, integrated Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, and Office 2010 environment… right from your desktop. SQL Server 2008 R2 Hosted Trial Our Hosted Trial makes it easy for you to experience new features…
I found this something interesting while wandering over community which I would like to share. The post is whole about: DBML is not considering the table field's "Default value or Binding" setting which is a NotNull. I mean the field which can not be null but having default value set needs to be set…
There are plenty of resources that advise you about looking for signs that your storage hardware is having problems. SQL Server Alerts for 823, 824 and 825 are covered here by Paul Randall of SQL Skills: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-little-known-sign-of-impending-doom-error-825/ and here by…