One challenge for a DBA is to setup the appropriate backup plans for the databases under our responsibility. It is easy to use SSMS’s maintenance plans to get the job done or even just write a simple BACKUP DATABASE command…
Recently I found myself involved in a project where a tab delimited text file (updated daily) was being imported into a MS SQL Server 2008 R2 database and then the single imported table was manipulated into a handful of others…
Recently I came across an interesting bug when upgrading a SQL Server 2000 box to 2008 R2. With SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2, there is a situation where you are calling a local view that is also using…
The Need I’ve found myself, more times than once, needing to change disk drives that my user databases are found on. This could come up because you are moving a server and need to switch SANs, migrate from local storage…
Quick Announcement: I just wanted to throw a quick announcement out that SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 is available. Service Pack 2 includes Cumulative Updates 1 through 5 from SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 and is registered as version # 10.50.4000.0….
Often enough we encounter a situation where we need security to be migrated. Microsoft hasn’t made this task as easy as moving other things such as SQL Agent jobs since restoring the master database to another server is tricky at…
In the interest of providing minimal surface area exposure to my servers I have taken on the common practice of not installing development tools on any of my Production servers. In almost all cases this is no big deal because…
The Problem: Today I noticed the data drive of one of my Production servers growing. It wasn’t growing overly fast and it had been quite some time since the last SAN drive expansion so I gave the thumbs up to…
Last time we covered the basics of unattended installs in my post, Unattended (Silent) SQL Server Installations. Here I will be providing and explaining my PowerShell script for facilitating these installations. UPDATED: Click here for the QS-Config product page. Where you can…
As promised from my last post, Relocating SQL Server System Databases without Access to the Instance, today I will be blogging about ‘unattended’ or ‘silent’ installations of SQL Server. I will be discussing the concept and uses of the unattended…