Crystal Reports Formula for MSDB Dates and Times
As a DBA, I find myself spelunking through data and often having to present it in a somewhat human-friendly format. This is where my skills with Crystal Reports come in quite handy. I joke that I’m a Crystal Reports Jedi Master. Truth be told, I’ve just been working with the product entirely way too long. [...]
Backing Up for my Primary/Secondary Environments
Every environment is different, and that means everyone does backups differently. I thought I’d talk about how I do it in my environment. For most of our key business applications, we have two sets of servers, a primary and secondary. The secondary servers are in a different data center. Fortunately, bandwidth isn’t a problem. I [...]
Using sysjobhistory to Find What’s Running Longer than Usual
We all have SQL Agent jobs that run periodically. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that something ran longer than average last night? When something runs longer than average, this could indicate a looming problem. I love finding these things before they cause serious problems because that prevents my phone from ringing in the middle [...]
An Object by Any Other Name
In my career, I’ve seen a lot of database objects. And I’ve seen a lot of names, both good and bad. It seems that every shop I’ve worked in talks about naming standards. Unfortuately, those standards aren’t always followed. I’ve read some of the following ideas about naming standards: Tables should be prefixed with tbl [...]
Giving Microsoft Access a Seat at the Table
Ask any DBA what they think of Microsoft Access, and you’ll rarely see a smile. Perhaps you’ll get a laugh, but most DBAs will turn up their nose. What I’m about to say is probably blashphemy in the DBA community, but when used properly, Access can have a place in some environments. I pray that [...]