Well, I made it. After a long trek through Nebraska, Iowa, and part of Illinios I arrived early into Warrenville and to the Quest offices for Kevin Kline’s (blog | twitter) pre-conference on Performance Tuning & Troubleshooting. Kevin ran us through his “Rocks, Gravel, and Sand” methodology. This is an approach by which you take… Read More »
We have a vendor right now that periodically requests a backup file FTP’d to their server. Unfortunately we do not run the Enterprise version of SQL Server to be able to compress the backups, and nobody wants to manually take a backup file and compress it on a regular basis. Because of this I created… Read More »
First of all a big thanks to Jes Borland (Twitter | Blog) for hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday (#16) topic about aggregate functions. Ok. So it’s not *really* an aggregate function, but it uses them and it does aggregate. Yes, I am talking about the PIVOT function in SQL Server 2005+ that’s near and dear… Read More »
After experiencing another rate increase with DirecTV we had finally have enough. When we really sat down and discussed what channels we watch and what satellite was offering we found that we were basically paying $80 a month for a handful of crappy shows. Going in we knew we wanted Netflix, Amazon VOD, and Hulu.… Read More »
Thought I’d share a script I use to reset services nightly. This script will also e-mail if something goes wrong on the restart (which hasn’t ever been the case so far). This specific reason I built this is for a Tomcat server that has some problems with errand threads (I didn’t build it and can’t… Read More »
Had an idea the other day that it might be nice to be able to grab tweets based on a keyword and populate a SQL Server table. So I put together the following simple PowerShell script to do just that. First I create “tweet” table under a database called TwitterDB: [sql] CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tweets]( [published]… Read More »
Since the event was to be held at Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center my wife and I decided to make a day of it and pack up the kids and head down to Colorado Springs for SQL Saturday #66. We began the day early and hit the road at 6am to get down there. At… Read More »
So I’ve been playing around a bit with ASP.NET MVC lately and the ADO.NET Entity Data Model piece in Visual Studio. Being of a Dev/DBA mind I started to wonder what effect there was (if any) by willy-nilly adding all the tables of a given database to the Entity Data Model Diagram. Would it add… Read More »
A simple explanation is a stored procedure is a bit of T-SQL code that can take input parameters and is intended for use in queries that are regularly executed against SQL Server. It is “stored” within the database engine (hence the name). I’m not going to cover all of the benefits here, but I wanted… Read More »
It’s that time of year when people promise to themselves to lose weight, stop smoking, and stop writing cursors. This month’s TSQL Tuesday topic is about the latter, habits or things you’d change as a DBA. If you’re new to SQL Server you may not be aware that the amount of knowledge out there is… Read More »
