SQLServerPedia Syndication
Top Ten Operational Mistakes to Avoid
I’m working on a presentation for SQL Saturday in South Florida. The more I look at this, the more I really like it. Not Setting Min and Max Memory MIN: ”Use this much so nobody else can have it.” MAX: “Save some for the Operating System” – Prevents Paging Schema Changes at Peak Times ALTERing [...]
Meme Monday: I got 99 problems but a disk ain’t one
Tom LaRock posted an interesting meme for today. Here are my nine problems that aren’t disk. Vendors who make bad recommendations to my user community for “optimizing” SQL server, such as using autoshrink Other system administrators who insist on using SSMS from the database server An application that keeps changing the recovery model every time [...]
Using RUNAS to Clear a Hurdle
Like most companies, mine has to contend with some form of regulatory compliance. In our particular case, it’s Sarbanes-Oxyley 404, better known as SOX. We have some network policies to enforce compliance with the implementation of SOX. One of those policies is that people with elevated access to key systems have a seperate account for [...]
Exploring my Options
I’ve been presented with a rather unique problem. And the right solution had left me a little perplexed. My company has a SQL server at a business partner’s manufacturing site. The server is in what our network guys would consider a less than secure environment. They’re in the middle of setting up a permanent VPN [...]
My First SQL Saturday #sqlsat71
Yesterday was SQL Saturday 71 Boston. It was held at the Babson College Executive Conference center, and it was a pretty amazing experience. Not only were the venue and food fantastic, but the event itself was pretty amazing. SQL Saturday actually started on Friday evening with the speaker’s dinner. We met at the Top of [...]
Missing Values in IDENTITY Column
Somebody in the tech support department of our ERP vendor has to be hating me right now. I’m kind of okay with that. In a recent audit, the auditors wanted to demonstrate the integrity of our ERP system’s audit log and prove it hasn’t been tampered with. Considering the primary key on the table is [...]
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 [...]