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12 August 2007 19:09

Data Data everywhere even when you think its gone

The biggest problem I have faced in IT over the last decade has been loss of data. I have had the problem at work where servers have crashed and lost data, more often than not due to failure of disks. I have also personally felt the pain in a hard disk...
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17 July 2007 00:39

Add-ins for Management Studio

This is one of the popular requests, unfortunately its not going to be in Katmai. A number of people have done it through Redgate being the major guys. However I came across Seans post about his snapshot Addin ( I would love to see the code Sean) http...
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22 May 2007 23:28

How to access SQL Server when you've forget the password

There is a little known feature of SQL Server 2005 is that when you start SQL Server in single user mode local administrators of the server have sysadmin access to the sql server. You may feel this a security concern, but if a user can get local admin...
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16 May 2007 17:02

How many indexes do you have that aren't used?

If you run this sql on a sql 2005 box then you will see which indexes aren't used in queries compared with the number of times they are updated. select object_name ( s . object_id ) , * from sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats s join sys.indexes i on i . index_id...
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15 May 2007 18:26

SQL Compare is public beta

The latest version of SQL Compare is now in public beta. You can read more here http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?t=4836 . I'm a big fan of SQL compare although there are numerous annoyances I hope they have addressed. if (socialButtons...
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11 May 2007 08:32

SSIS - Viewing packages in Management Studio

Its odd how you often find things out by accident. Yesterday I was copying a dts package into a folder on my server and for some reason the drop didn't drop. When I then switched to management studio and XP finally decided to drop the file it did it in...
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09 May 2007 19:05

Katmai - Group Policy for SQL Server

If you've worked in a large AD shop you will have come across Group Policy. A means by which you can make sure each component in a domain has the same settings, behaves the same way, has the same security. This is essential when managing a large server...
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23 April 2007 20:50

Limit a sql script to only run with SQLCMD turned on

I really like SQLCMDso much so that most of my deployment scripts use SQLCMD. Its got some great features such as :on error exit. Forcing your script to exit when an error occurs. or :r <filename> to read the contents of a file There is one downside...
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17 January 2007 00:43

Raw file reader has been updated

My raw file reader has now been updated, the following are the changes from the previous version Column headers can be included if more than one column is selected. Context menu to copy data from the grid Can read a package for raw files and will load...
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11 January 2007 11:58

SSIS Rawfile viewer - now available

If you've used SSIS in anger you will have come across Raw files. Unfortunately when you store data in a raw file it is in accesible. There is no tool available to view the data, Until now. I recently put together a tool that allows you to read the contents...
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08 January 2007 00:30

SSIS - Raw file reader utility

I have put together a little utility to read raw files. Before I finish it off I would like some feeback. The current feature set is; Read any SSIS Raw file Results displayed in a grid Columns automatically resized Order of columns can be changed The...
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11 December 2006 16:54

The best RSS and NNTP reader is now Free

Jetbrains have announced that Omea is going open source. This is going to involve a steps before it will be available including releasing 2.2, moving to VS2005, changing the source control and moving the build to TeamCity. More importantly they have now...
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16 November 2006 01:07

Custom reports in SQL 2005 SP2

You may have come across the fact that in SP2 you can deploy custom reports that are accessible in management studio. This reports can be run from any context in the object explorer tree. Whilst I think this is really interesting, I haven't played with...
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18 September 2006 23:35

Do you think SSMS is slow?

Well there are a few reasons for some slowness. One of them is when you display the details of a job. SSMS executes sp_helpjob which returns ALL jobs, even though your only displaying ONE. If you think this sucks then vote now to try and get this fixed...
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