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If you start at a new place, as a SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA), what is one of the first things you should do? In my opinion, after figuring out the key servers and instances running you need to support… is setting up alerts. By setting up alerts you can start to get an idea [...]

Had a request to export data out from SQL Server to Excel directly. There are a few ways you can do this. BCP is one, another is OPENROWSET. SSIS, etc.  Here is the OPENROWSET method, using Jet (I think this only works on 32bit servers as well) First you need to enable a setting on [...]

Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 is out, and Excel 2010 is out. You can get PowerPivot (http://powerpivot.com/) and create your own in memory cubes! …. Or something like that. I still haven’t figure out where PowerPivot fits in a business scenario. Why? Well first you have what are now being called the “old school” [...]

Source Control. In my eyes, one of the best inventions of development. Software Developers have used it for years, and it allows them to easily develop in a team environment, and be less scared they will lose a change or not be able to see things they did historically. I have blogged a few times [...]

Since we recently upgraded to SQL 2008, now I have some small tidbits that I can share! First one is this: Intellisense updating. In SQL 2008, it has built in Intellisense, pretty awesome. Until you add new objects, then everything is red underlined. What to do? Well if you are writing some T-SQL in SQL [...]

Figured out today that in SSRS, if you add a filter to your dataset, and you want to use “Like”, that the operand for everything is * instead of % like you might be used to in SQL, sometimes it is just the little things :)

In many shops, I am guessing there are multiple servers. Development, Production, maybe a Staging, etc. With SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), you set up data sources, connection to databases. In SSAS you usually have a connection which then you build your data source view off of, and in [...]

Last night I configured up SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) on a test box. It looks good so far. I ran into a few issues with the box/setup that I had to tweak in order to get it working. I had to allow “handlers” and “modules” in the applicationHost config on the machine. IIS [...]

SQL 2005 introduced DDL Triggers, where you could catch events on your DDL statements in SQL, and hopefully most DBA’s are catching them, at least to a table and have some kind of report on who is adding, changing and deleting what objects. What I wanted to do was capture that, but also keep and [...]

I use SQL Agent a ton. It is like my go to place to schedule jobs and tasks. Problem is, there are pieces “missing”. Like if a job hangs, you can have it auto stop after a given amount of time. It doesn’t alert on changes to a job, etc, etc. I asked on twitter [...]