Did you know that installing certain Windows features could impact the way that SQL gets installed on your server? Me either. When performing some installs recently I came across a problem whereby I was not able to change the shared tools location. The option was greyed out. This didn’t make any sense to me. The…
How To Interview–A Quick Guide
This post was originally going to be called “Interview Dos and Dont’s” but I didn’t want it to get confused with interviewing on DOS, or to start a grammar war on the use of Do’s or Dos. I had the chance to interview a couple of candidates for a senior developer position today. Each one…
SQL Clustering–Network Binding Order Warnings
In setting up my Windows 2008 R2/SQL 2008 R2 cluster this week I came across a warning in the Setup Support Rules stating that “The domain network is not the first bound network.” This didn’t make any sense to me as I had been very careful in setting the binding order in the network…
T-SQL Tuesday #18–CTE A Simpler Form Of Recursion
It’s T-SQL Tuesday time folks. Bob Pusateri (blog|twitter) is the host and has chosen Common Table Expressions (CTEs) as the topic of the month. Several ideas came to mind for writing about CTEs, one of the best uses I’ve seen for one recently was to grab the name of the most recent backup file for…
Stop Logging Successful Backups
It’s great that SQL writes to the Event log and SQL log every time a backup completes. You get to see lots of data saying that database master was backed up and database model was backed up, then that msdb was backed up etc… Is it really that useful? Well, at least it can be…
Adding LUNs In VMware – A Cautionary Tale
Over the last 10 years plus of being a DBA I’ve performed LUN manipulation tasks on dozens of occasions with no errors or problems. Other than adding new disks to Windows 2003 clusters I’ve never had to take SQL Server offline to perform these tasks either. A simple request I needed a new drive to…
Fun With Windows Logins In SQL
Sometimes you come across quirkiness when playing with SQL Server. Once in a while those things are related to security. This happens to be one of those times. Release My Code I was provided with a script by the dev team to create a new proc and grant permissions on that proc to a Windows…
Are You Putting Out?–The SQL OUTPUT Clause
I had some code come through the other day from a developer, it was designed to perform an insert and then return the inserted data back to the client for display. This kind of code is probably seen very frequently out there in the real world. Quick, Create A Table As we’ll be playing around…
Keeping MSDB Clean
I have a bunch of monitoring routines running against my SQL Servers. One of these checks available disk space on drives. Today I was surprised to see that one of my SQL system drives was looking pretty full. This is unusual to say the least because I dedicate a drive to the system (master/model/msdb) databases.…
T-SQL Tuesday #13–A Mysterious Business
It’s T-SQL Tuesday again and Steve Jones (blog|twitter), Mr SQLServerCentral, is hosting this month. Steve has provided a topic that is near and dear to the heart of pretty much every DBA – “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done”. I really didn’t know what I could possibly…