miscellaneous

Well, based on some relatively recent posts I’m pretty sure you can all guess what this will be… it’s Christmas and therefore we need a Christmas drawing!!!

So I’ve been a little quiet on here recently, well there’s a good reason… 3 weeks ago today I became a dad for the first time and therefore I’ve been a little too tied up to keep my website up to date.

I’ve been wanting to attend one of these ultimate training courses from Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp for a long time now and finally I managed to get the time off, the money together and book myself on.


Therefore at the beginning of this month I was out in Chicago partaking in some of the most intensive, yet enjoyable, SQL training money can buy. (Aside from my own, of course :o))

This is vital to the health and safety of your data and databases. Running regular consistency checks will allow you to spot any corruption within your database at any and all levels. Nearly all databases will have some element of corruption at some time or other and therefore you need to be prepared.

This came about due to incredibly bizarre request I received which happened to throw me a little. Basically I was told by a business that they actually had no idea how many SQL Servers they had or on which machines they could be running. They asked if I knew a way to find them.

This is an incredibly valuable, and free, tool you can use with SQL Server in order to get a real feel as to how your server is performing, where to look for issues, and miscellaneous other nuggets of information.

Ever been writing some code and found that you need some data from another SQL Server instance? You have security access to the other instance so what do you do?


Well you could easily use a linked server to obtain it, but what if there is no linked server set up and you lack the rights to (or maybe there’s a company rule forbidding) setting one up?

This occured on a client's machine after they had migrated their SQL Server to new hardware with a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 R2. They attempted to use a linked server and received the following error message:

This is just a little tip in case you ever have to make a lot of updates or inserts using a while loop and don’t mind a short amount of blocking while you do it.