Today a great client asked me how to export a VM to an OVF or OVA so he could transport the VM to another environment. That’s a great question! It had been a while since I have done this so I researched the best way on vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 to perform this. Things have…
Year: 2012
I Survived!
Well my first SQL Saturday presentation has been completed. No one was injured, I didn’t respond to my flight (as in fight or flight) instincts, and no one heckled me. It didn’t go as well as I imagined but it was a learning experience. I will get better, so if you attended my session today,…
Keeping Track of Details
After creating a few new SQL accounts this morning, I thought I would share how I keep track of minor details like this. We use SharePoint for our department to track documents, procedures, processes, etc. This is a great place to track minute SQL Server details like accounts and databases. For example, we have over…
Why Your DBAs Need Access to VMware vCenter
Your DBAs need direct access to VMware vCenter. Shocking, eh? At a minimum, they need read-only access to the performance statistics for their virtual machines hosting their database server, as well as the host that they reside upon. I consider a requirement for all DBAs to have vCenter performance statistics access in environments where I…
Extended Properties Are Your Friend
It’s nice to have friends, why aren’t you a friend of extended properties? They can make your like so much easier by helping to document your databases and objects. Take a basic table create statement Transact-SQL CREATE TABLE [dbo].[EatSomeBoogers]( [ID] [int] NOT NULL, [BgType] [varchar](20) NOT NULL, [Size] [smallint] NULL, [Viscosity] [tinyint] NULL ) ON…
How Do You Provide Passwords To Your Users?
Passwords are a necessary evil and there are times when you have to hand out a password for a SQL login (because the POS application doesn’t support Windows Authentication). Traditionally I’ve done this by sending an email to the user with the login and a separate one with the password, figuring that internal security controls…
Passing SQL Data To Command Line Processes Within SQL Jobs
Wow, that title is a bit of a mouthful, let me give you a scenario to help understand what the business problem was that I ran in to today. We have a production database running on SQL 2008 which contains a CLR procedure that accepts a reportID value, queries some data and writes out to…
AD Accounts Are Great, But…
Using Windows Authentication for your database is a great best practice to follow. However, one caveat to remember as one of my administrators found out today. Do not use that account as a login if it is also the account you use for your database. We setup an AD account for his database, that part…
Presentation Ponderings
After my first presentation at SQL Saturday Pensacola, I am ready to do another and need to submit for SQL Saturday Orlando later this month. All of that is not a problem, I just don’t know if I should do what I did in Pensacola and expand on it because the audience seemed to enjoy…
Changing SQL Agent Job Subsystem Queue Lengths
In the event you are running a lot of jobs on your SQL Server, or you happen to have a great number of jobs that kick off close to each other and use the same subsystem (i.e. PowerShell) then you might receive a warning in the SQL Agent Error Log stating that the job step…