SQL Server Blogs

Day 9. How close is your data to the edge! Integer identity columns that increment by 1, have been known to run out of numbers. I have seen it occur on a few occasions on highly transactional systems. However there is really no excuse for getting caught out. The folwoing code easily shows you were your identity table columns ...

Day 8. As you might know TempDB is created every time SQL server service is restarted, but do you know what size it will start at next time you start SQL? Well this script shows you, its amazing how many production servers don’t get sized from the default when SQL was installed and its quite suspiring just how small that is, 8Mg!, So if you have ...

  Day 7. The MERGE statement is one that quite a few DBA are aware of and use but is under used by developers. I think because they are not aware of all the scenarios that it can be used in. I recently had a variety of scenarios that developers had asked my opinion on , or a review of some code and found its perfect to use MERGE. I put ...

Day 6 and a Friday so keep it simple. There are occasions where you want to delete a huge table and truncation is just not an option for various reasons, but deleting from the table creates a huge transaction log. You don’t want to over engineer the solution so heres a simple example thats takes copy of the table and deleted in chunks of 1000 in ...

Day 5 Pretty easy thing to setup, but can look very effective in a report, you can use gauges but I wanted fore some Health check reports to go for the old traffic light system. To help the Management at work to easily digest if their SQL servers are Critical (Red) Nearly there (Amber) or running ok (Green) First things first you need some ...

Day 4 and still rehashing some old post i needed to migrate from another site. In the garden burning wood and posting the latest blog when the bench collapsed around me . This is a list of the top 10 queries I use on a frequent basis that are relatively simple, either one liners or next to one liners. These are in reverse order from 10 through ...

Day 3, of a blog a day I was hoping for more time for this post but we’ll see how it goes. I looked through some of my Google Documents and found some interesting bits that I’d collected around PowerShell so i thought I’d put them in a blog for future reference and have a play around with it. and as it this SQL related I’ll stick to SQLps. It can ...

Day 2 of a post every day ! I was asked recently how you could get the latest/earliest date field across a row of data, not the most usual request it tends to be the maximum value in a column and then its just a straight forward GROUP BY and MAX in that case. However given the example above the user wanted for each driver to take the minimum ...

Productivity  I have decided after unsuccessfully not blogging once this year to blog each day in May. The simple premise is that I have got to blog at least once ( can't see me doing it more than once but who knows) daily and be of useful content, maybe the first one can be excused till I get back into the swing of things. In an ...

We have completed several upgrades from SQL 2000 and SQL2005 to SQL2008 and I thought I would blog about the top 5 things for a successful upgrade. There are lots of things that make an upgrade a success, these are just some of them.Get a great project team together, this might seem obvious but it can make or break the project. ...