Quickie on programming equality tests
Just noticed this come up on my Facebook news feed – how to code assignment statements when programming (not in T-SQL): if (foo == 4)
Just noticed this come up on my Facebook news feed – how to code assignment statements when programming (not in T-SQL): if (foo == 4)
In February this year we stopped off in Bangkok on the way to and from teaching in Hyderabad. On one of the days we did some
(And it's official – this is blog post 39 this month, making this my most prolific month yet for blogging. An arguably dubious achievement…) In
Jack Li, one of the Senior Escalation Engineers in Product Support, just posted details of an interesting case over on the CSS blog – his article
Just saw this on a forum – running REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS on msdb to cope with corruption. Yes, this will work but it's certainly not safe and
(Yes, Kimberly's lecturing again…) Here's something that I've seen crop up a lot recently on corruption forums: Server: Msg 602, Level 21, State 50, Line
(Continuing my habit of blogging while Kimberly’s presenting – at least I’m not on stage this time…) In early versions of SQL Server, it was
I'm very pleased, and deeply honored, to announce that I've been made a Microsoft Regional Director. This is one of a very small group of
After teaching some of the MCM-SharePoint class last week, one of the attendees pointed me at a blog post about measuring churn in SharePoint databases.
While I was teaching the MCM-Database class last week, we were discussing fragmentation and the effect of a high-order GUID key on an index. Without
A thread cropped up on SQLServerCentral involving IAM chain corruption (see Inside the Storage Engine: IAM pages, IAM chains, and allocation units for details of IAM
In this week's survey, I'd like to know *how* you run consistency checks, not how often. I'll report on the results next week (around 3/27/09)
Last week’s survey was on what kind of regular index maintenance you perform (see here for the survey) as a way of kicking off a
Way back at the start of me blogging here I wrote a comprehensive description of ghost records and the ghost cleanup process – see Inside
I’m teaching the Microsoft Certified Masters – Database qualification this week here in Redmond, and in part of day one I discuss the FILESTREAM directory
There's a long-running discussion with people tagging each other to post advice for people new to SQL Server, about what they know now and wished
Yes, it's that time again (well a little bit earlier than usual). With the Spring SQL Server Connections show coming up next week, its time
I'm about to start a new series of post about index fragmentation and removing it. For this week's survey, I'd like to know what index
Last week I kicked off the first weekly survey – on whether you validate your backups or not (see here for the survey). The results
Ola Hallengren, who we meet every so often at SQL Connections, has a great script that helps automate consistency checking, backups, and index maintenance. He's
Ok – so Kimberly got on Facebook last weekend after peer-pressure from a bunch of people at Katie's 9th birthday party. I resisted, in vain
After writing the FILESTREAM whitepaper for Microsoft, I’ve had lots of questions about the structure of the FILESTREAM data container. The FILESTREAM data container is
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals finally starts to roll off the presses at Microsoft Press today! For me this is the first time in
I came across a good post over at the Data Management section of Less Than Dot, describing how to scan through a network looking for
The April edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column. This month's
As you may know, Kimberly and I teach (and wrote) the first week of the 3-week Microsoft Certified Master – Database qualification. From next week
Both 2005 SP3 CU2 and 2005 SP2 CU12 contain fixes for two bugs that cause corruption in LOB data. The first bug may happen when
As you may know, DBCC CHECKDB (and some of the other DBCC CHECK*) commands use an internal database snapshot to get a transactionally consistent view
Whenever I teach a class I’m amazed at the number of DBAs who don’t know about instant file initialization. Without wanting to redo blog posts
There's been an interesting discussion on SQLServerCentral about whether this question is valid for a DBA interview: what's the name of the executable that runs
This is an interesting case that cropped up yesterday – the transaction log is damaged so a log backup doesn’t work (with the error below):
I'm toying with the idea of having a weekly survey that'll highlight an interesting facet of database management. I've signed up with SurveyPopups.com, which is
We’re doing some research into database settings that people use and the best way to get a good variety of systems is to ask you
One of the opinions that was expressed yesterday by our developer friends (a bunch of Regional Directors – and look, Kimberly's the featured RD today
Today we've spent a lot of the day in discussions with some folks about developers vs. DBAs, and how it's often the case that the
In January I finally got to visit India for the first time. I've always wanted to go as my great-grandfather was in charge (I believe)
If you're new to the blog then you may not have seen my Search Engine Q&A series (or seen it and not realized what it
As you may have been seeing over the last few weeks, there are intermittent errors in some parts of mine and Kimberly's blogs. Our hosting
One set of features i haven't blogged about yet in SQL Server 2008 are the new security features: SQL Server Audit, Transparent Data Encryption, and
This question came up in a class I was teaching a few weeks ago: given that the variable-length column offset array in a record only
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