Driving The Database Engine

Here is a script that will create a job to re-index each user database in an instance that is not in read-only mode. The script uses a cursor to identify the available databases and creates a job step with a script to perform online reindexing on that...

Here's a script that will check for and display any pending file rename operations . Windows stores the information on locked files that need to be renamed or deleted at startup. This is usually a result of an install or update that tries to replace files...

Here is an un-official but interesting article about the future of hosted database services: http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/windows_servers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400585&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All I have witnessed corporate migrations...

Here's another version of the reindex script that supports SQL Server 2005/2008 Standard and Workgroup Editions. It's got the online re-indexing code stripped out. If you're running something else like Workgroup, just change the code that checks for ...

Here's a function that will obfuscate a string of credit card or social security numbers. It can be useful to prevent information from being displayed in reports or other output from the database. You can download the script from the file attachment...

The Microsoft SQL Server Performance Dashboard contains a drill-down report detailing information about missing indexes. Although you might think that this report makes it easy to implement new indexes and improve the performance of your database queries...

The Index Physical Statistics report in SQL Management Studio is an easy way to identify fragmented indexes. But the report won't run against a database set to 8.0 (SQL Server 2000) compatibility mode. Here's a script that will generate a list of fragmented...

A utility to generate unit tests for Visual Studio Team Suite has been posted to Codeplex. This tool takes a SQL Profiler trace file and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of database calls found in the trace file. The unit test is designed...

From SQL Server 2005 Books Online, Configuring Integration Services in a Clustered Environment : The Integration Services service is not a clustered or cluster-aware service, and does not support failover from one cluster node to another. Therefore...

I wanted to apologize to anyone who has wondered why my blog has gone cold in the last few months. My work load has kept me running in deep waters. It's been difficult to come up to periscope depth lately so I can post new content. I'm hoping the holidays...

SQL Saturdays are events organized by local SQL user groups (mostly) that consist of a one day training event for SQL Server professionals. I've volunteered to speak at the SQL Saturday event in Atlanta. It's being hosted by the good people at Atlanta...

Mark Pohto, one of our Microsoft IT senior system engineer's, just published an excellent technical white paper SQL Server Consolidation at Microsoft on Technet. This paper describes how Microsoft approached the issue of consolidating thousands of SQL...

As a consultant working in the field, I am part of a relatively small group of people who are customer-facing (with an emphasis on facing). I am one of the front-line employees who's job it is to assist our customers with implementing our products and...

Thanks to those of you who attended SQLSaturday and a special thanks to all the volunteers from the Atlanta.MDF user group who put on a great event! Here is the presentation I did for the SQLSaturday event in Atlanta. Please feel free to download and...

The updated version of this essential Business Intelligence book has been published. If you don't have it, get it. If you have the SQL Server 2005 version, it's time to upgrade. From the Kimball Group web site : "Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite...

All the official Microsoft Team Blogs are now listed on BlogMS. These are blogs maintained by the product teams and contain tons of good information about what's going on with our products. Here's the link to BlogMS . In case you're wondering why my...

Jimmy May and Denny Lee (along with a huge supporting cast) have published an excellent white paper on disk alignment best practices. This is a must-read document for DBAs, storage engineers and architects. Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for...

These are links to material relevant to consolidating and upgrading SQL Server. SQL Server Consolidation on the 64-Bit Platform - Lessons Learned Pre-deployment IO Best Practices Six Failover Clustering Benefits Realized from Migrating to SQL...

As many of you know, Windows 7 RTM is now available to MSDN and Technet subscribers. I've had the bits for Ultimate for a little over two weeks now. I would like to share my personal upgrade experience with you. First to get the new bits was my work...

If you can read one of the fifteen languages supported by the Windows Live Translator, you can now view this blog in one of those languages. Simply click on the dropdown at the top of this web page to select the language. A new browser window will open...

In this episode, guest Paul Thurrott joins Dmitry and Peter to discuss Windows Server 2008 R2 and Virtualization. Also Peter and Dmitry discuss the news about Codeplex.org, an open source software foundation created by Microsoft. The Connected Show...

The best tool I’ve found yet is a utility named Fiddler. It is a useful tool that's used by web developers to trace IP traffic on the client. Fiddler is a web debugging proxy that logs and displays valuable information about what's going on between the browser and server. Fiddler is downloaded and installed on the client machine. When it is executed, it creates a local proxy that intercepts web traffic and displays metrics about response times, size and type of data and has viewers to display the actual data. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP and HTTPS traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language....

After a big effort, the MSDN and Technet blog platform has been upgraded. This new platform should provide a lot of new funcationality. I've been waiting for this to pass before posting any new content. But now it's time to get back to work and post.

This whitepaper describes five commonly-deployed architectures using SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 R2 that are designed to meet the high-availability and disaster recovery requirements of enterprise applications. The whitepaper describes the architectures...

There's a new book out on PowerPivot for Excel 2010 by Sivakumar Harinath, Ron Pihlgren and Denny Guang-Yeu Lee. It covers PowerPivot end-to-end including Sharepoint 2010. It's published by Wrox and available at many retailers. Professional Microsoft...