My Epic Life Quest – Level 2 Achieved
DING – LEVEL 2 !!! I am excited to announce that I have achieved level 2 in My Epic Life Quest. My epic life quest is an idea that I got from Steve Kamb via Brent Ozar. As life goals…
Start and Save Hyper-V VMs with PowerShell
I use Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 R2 on most of my local workstations between home and work. In order to conserve memory, I turn my Hypver-V lab environments on and off as I need them. Given that my…
Availability Group fail-over test with PowerShell
I have a number of SQL Server Availability Groups in my organization. Of them, most are multi-site configurations for disaster recovery. Naturally, the latency that a separate data center implies is more than my application can handle for its writes….
Connecting to an Availability Group Listener with SQL Server Management Studio
Background When a cluster has an Availability Group installed on it, there is an optional listener which is used to manage connections through fail-over events. This listener has an IP address assigned to it and, when the Availability Group fails over…
How to change the schema of a table
The other day I set out to performance tune a database deployment. The company was getting ready to implement almost a year’s worth of database schema drift where major restructuring had occurred. One of the first things that I noticed…
A first timer’s lessons learned at PASS Summit 2014
Me, as a #sqlfirsttimer Just one year ago I didn’t know what the PASS Summit was. What came after has been a series of serendipitous events. I went to Charlotte, NC to Red-Gate’s SQL in the City event because it was within driving…
Query Central Management Server with PowerShell SMO
All production or operational DBAs need to maintain a server / instance list. SQL Server’s Central Management Server (CMS) is a great means of managing that list with auxiliary benefits such as group queries, a central location for managing policies and SQL…
Rebooting HRSSUG
This week I’m excited to announce the reboot of the Hampton Roads SQL Server User Group (HRSSUG). We will be coming back online this Novemeber, holding meetings every third Wednesday of the month. Check out our announcement below and be…
Backup testing with PowerShell
This week I released a two part blog series on SQLShack.com. The series covers automated testing for your backup files and reporting on the results. Many elements of PowerShell, SMO, T-SQL, and SQL Server Reporting Services are covered. Abstract Once your…
Dynamically create table results from non-query
Have you ever executed a command with a result set but you didn’t know the exact schema being returned? Have you ever wanted to create a temporary table from a query but don’t want to look up all of the…