Why We Follow Best Practices There are many reasons why we follow best practices. My own reasons have changed over the course of my career. Early in my career as a database developer and then later as a new DBA, I followed best practices because people who claimed to know more about SQL Server said…
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Including Missing Values in Data Ranges Without a Lookup Table One of the ways that I learn new things is by helping others with their issues or questions. In my career, this has served me well by exposing me to a vast array of experiences that I may not have otherwise seen. I try to…
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Webcast: Putting a Better SQL Server in Production Webcast: Putting a Better SQL Server in Production Date: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM Eastern Time / 2:00 PM CT / 12:00 PM PT Problems come up everyday that could have been avoided by simply configuring SQL Server appropriately before using it. The…
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Using Dynamic Values in XMLA A question was raised on Twitter today via the #sqlhelp hash tag about passing parameter values to XMLA for a backup script. The popular answer at the time I saw it was to dynamiclly create and drop a SQL job to run the script every time you need it to…
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SQL PASS Summit 2011: Session Files This past week was the SQL PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, WA. I presented three sessions (regular session, lightning talk, panel discussion) plus ran a focus group on advanced certification and hosted a Birds of a Feather lunch table on disaster recovery. It was a busy, busy week. Below…
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The Barking Dog Analogy A discussion started today on Twitter about CXPacket waits. There had been a heated debate on the subject on Twitter the previous night (wow, does that sound geeky), so many of us got looped into today’s discussion. Someone had experienced a problem with a delete query on a large table causing…
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Auditing Users in a Failover Partner Database I read a question on a discussion list today asking if it is possible to audit SELECT queries on a log shipping secondary in stand-by mode. His attempts to set it up had obviously failed because the database is read-only and you cannot create a database audit in…
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Session Files for Replication Magic Presentation to WSSUG I presented my session on Replication Magic: Initializing from Backup to the Wichita SQL Server User Group last night. I took a little longer to post my session files so I could add comments to the SQL scripts. Session files are below. Powerpoint silde deck: ReplicationMagic.pptx (1.27…
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The Power of Inequality Inequality can be a cool thing in SQL Server. You can do some cool tricks with it as well. Have you ever needed to create an exact copy of a table programmatically (yes, I’m talking about SELECT … INTO) without inserting any data into it? You can do it through the…
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T-SQL Tuesday #18 – Using CTEs to Pivot Data Into Date Ranges This blog entry is participating in T-SQL Tuesday #18, hosted this month by Bob Pusateri (Blog|@SQLBob). You are invited to visit his blog to join the blog party. You are welcome to write your own participating blog post for the party or just…
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