AIN'T YOU GOT NO BOOKLEARNIN'? This, the eighth T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by the SQL Soldier, Robert Davis (Blog | Twitter) and he's asking how we learn and how we teach. How I Learned Throughout my school years I seem to have been assigned a disproportionate number of "old-school" teachers who could be …

Read More

And now for something completely different. I realize there's probably been countless thoughts, blog posts and jokes on the subject of elevator etiquette, but I think mine's a little different as it concerns whether or not using the elevator is polite in certain situations. Allow me to explain: In college I spent the …

Read More

Note MozyHome no longer exists. I'm leaving this post up for posterity and to show what it was like, as well as my opinion of it at that time. In a previous post, I talked about disaster recovery strategies for the home and promised reviews on the services I use. Today I'll take a look at Mozy. I've been a satisfied …

Read More

One of the nifty features available in SQL Server 2008 is the "Optimize for Ad hoc Workloads" option, which is at the instance level. If your workload involves a high number of ad hoc queries that are used only once, your plan cache (also known as the "procedure cache") may benefit from enabling …

Read More

A key function of a DBA is to plan, test, and implement disaster recovery policies for the databases they maintain. DBAs lacking these skills may also find themselves lacking a job if they are unable to recover data when necessary. For all these skills we apply in the workplace, I have still heard via Twitter a few …

Read More

A few days ago Tim Ford (blog | twitter) put forth a challenge to describe a transaction in a non-technical fashion. I could have replied to the post directly, but I figured it would be rather wordy. Instead I decided to follow the lead of Janice Lee (blog | twitter) and write a post about it, providing Tim with a neat …

Read More

No more than an output to me, but it sure was to SQL Server! This issue kept me busy over the weekend, and most definitely gave me a case of Saturday Night SQL Fever (as opposed to "SQL Saturday Night Fever", for which the only cure is more karaoke). When executing a stored procedure with an OUTPUT parameter, …

Read More

I've never been a fan of Apple. Despite making a living off SQL Server, I don't consider myself to be a Windows fanboy by any stretch of the imagination either, but I never imagined that I would buy a Mac. One of the easiest arguing points back in the day was the availability of software. Games on a mac? There was that …

Read More

This post is my contribution to T-SQL Tuesday #007, hosted this month by the SQLChicken himself, Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter). Since I'm a bad DBA and have yet to get my hands on a copy of R2, I'll make use of the rule that we can discuss any feature from 2008. My favorite is filtered indexes, as they were the …

Read More

At my previous employer I took part in several projects that involved migrating databases not only to new hardware but also to new versions of SQL Server. We upgraded machines running the 2000 and 2005 versions of SQL Server to 2008. Here's how we went about doing it, and some helpful hints we figured out along the …

Read More