Developer hearted / Relational minded

  (Sample code included at the end of the post) The initiator for this post was Dan Atkins who wanted to create a feed from relational data to consume it directly from a created gadget. Where can I find that in the toolbox ? First of all, you won...

Do you want to script out the jobs available in SQL Server Agent ? There a many ways to skin the cat. The probably easiest one is to us the built in functionality of SSMS. Simply select all the jobs (doing a STRG+A on the Object Explorer list) and...

Doing a SKUUPGRADE has changed a little bit in SQL Server 2008. Instead of using the SKKUUPGRADE from the SETUP.EXE as in SQL Server 2005 you can now specify the parameter /ACTION=Upgrade. [1] For the GUI friends, there is a new Edition Upgrade wizard...

  After many months of hard work, collaboration, short weekends and nights, the new ALM Rangers guidance document is out covering Visual Studio Database Projects. Details about the documents and the documents themselves can be found here: Visual...

(Updated version available in this blog post ) How can we expand files from a .sql file referenced with the :r operator ? Ok, lets make a step back in the past and see how we used to reference files in .sql files and calling them via OSQL or ISQL...

(Update: Due to security reasons the functionality retrieving data from SSIS packages has been deprecated and is no longer available in SQL Server 2008 R2) (Sample project attached to the blog entry !) Having stated the need for getting data from...

  (The project is attached to this blog post, if you have any questions, feel free to send me a mail. You find the bits for download here .) The most recent version can be found here For all of you who haven´t been able to read my blog entry on logging...

For those struggling as I did for getting the complete list of all facets and its properties available, I went down the dark side of the code (Reflection) and got the methods to extract the information from the PBM framework. As a complete reference ...

(UPDATE: Updated technical version is available through this blog post here . The basic information and background though is available in the blog post you are reading) A week ago a colleague asked for different options to do audit stored procedure...

  In some cases you might face the problem that SQL Server Agent Service didn't come up or was stopped for reason. Jobs scheduled in the downtime will not run automatically when the Agent service comes up again, and that is a good thing. I often...

Some time ago I got an interesting questions why the following applies: -- drop table a create table a(m varchar ( max ), i int ) go declare @cnt int --Explicit transaction begin tran set @cnt=@@trancount insert into a select 'inside...

Due to the problem that there is no definite table for getting information about the current status of jobs, I created a small procedure grabbing the information from parts of the internal procedures used to extract the very relevant information. As an...

Nothing really fancy, but a small script I was now asked twice for. So I thought I publish it for the public and for the reference for others. It simply calculates the percentage of NULL values for a specific table in all columns. The last request was...

Ever wanted to get feedback and interim results like a progress from a stored procedure ? Well, not that easy as the results such as PRINT information is send after the batch has been completed. If you want to get information back from your batches you...

Many of you often tried to and ask for how to enumerate the Parameters the collection. The MSDN has a very clear statement about that:   “You cannot use a Microsoft Visual Basic For Each construct to step through the collection. You need to...

(Code can be downloaded here ) The Backup part “Can you please give me a recent backup of all user databases on that computer please ?” That is the sentence that will delay your planned work for the afternoon and will keep you busy for numerous hours...

  In some cases it it interesting to know whether a database was directly created on the current version of the running SQL Server instance or if the database was upgraded during an upgrade of the instance or by attaching a database from an older...

  For those asking a couple of times if the JobScripter for SQL Server Agent jobs is also available in 2008… here it is ! The only difference is that the version v2 is now targeting to SMO Assemblies of SQL Server 2008 which is version 10.0. This...

SQL Server 2005 introduced an interesting and long demanded feature, the LOGON triggers. First only defined via server event triggers, it has become more and more popular in same scenarios to prevent users with a certain machine environment accessing...

Coming as a simple sample with PBM (creating a policy with a condition that procedure names shouldn't´t start with SP_) and getting an interesting question in one of my classes, I wanted to revisit the question about the yet in some places existing naming...

  My colleague Marvelous Jimmy ( JimmyMay ) and myself did a small project to parse and interpret the results of the testing tool SQLIO. It produces ready-to-interpret reports and reusable results in Excel and will save you (as of Jimmy) much time...

(Download the dbo.fndblog2 function here ) Update and word of caution: Be aware that   the mentioned function is undocumented and subject to change in any release of SQL Server. You should only use that for investigational purposes and in case you...

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2008/04/15/sql-server-2005-sp3-coming-soon.aspx -Jens

As it was hard to find the cause of this error and the answer, I wanted to share some searchable information on the internet for that. The following problem occurs while doing an upgrade of “older” VSDB project to the new GDR releases. As you have seen...

A colleague (Cornel Sukalla) asked me what the protocol_version in sys.dm_exec_connections is all about. From the output it seems that its an INT presenting the version for the protocol used by the client. With some research and having in mind that those...