LessThanDot Site Logo

LessThanDot

A decade of helpful technical content

This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.

Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2008 White Paper Released

Microsoft made available the Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2008 white paper on their site. This white paper is 102 pages long, the scope of this white paper is limited to the problems commonly seen by Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS). Below is what is covered in this white paper: _Introduction Goals Methodology Resource Bottlenecks Tools for Resolving Resource Bottlenecks CPU Bottlenecks Memory Bottlenecks I/O Bottlenecks tempdb Slow-Running Queries

Read More...

The DBA.. their role, expectations and future?

As promised from topic http://forum.lessthandot.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4735&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=DBA I’m making a blog entry on my expectations of a DBA. My reply to the question DBA in my eyes and how I perform the job is… Mid to Sr level TSQL abilities in order to fulfill business requirements in data access not directly available to developers. Personally don’t think a DBA is much if they don’t have at least mid-career skills in TSQL. They should be the ones telling the developers what not to write and how to write it.

Read More...

Add Report Wizard Layout Style (Standard Company Style)

Did you know you can add layout styles to the report wizard and load into existing reports? I’m referring to the list that contains slate, forest, generic etc.. I always thought this was pretty cool and thought I would share how to do it. First go into your respected Visual Studio installation directory. I believe the location is the same and has not changed from 7,8 and 9. Find this directory

Read More...

Rebuild master and restore system databases from complete disk failure

I just had the pleasure of going through this again on my machine so I figured I would put it up there for people that have yet to gain the experience of a complete SQL Server failure from system database corruption (suspect), disk failure and a few others. I’m going to break my favorite installation of SQL Server 2005 so you can see how to recover it. First to show the status of master we run

Read More...

Default Dates in SSRS Reports

For reports that requires start and end dates as parameters, typically the default dates are set as today and today + 1 day or today + 1 month. Instead it might be a good idea to pick up the start and end dates from the database. This way the user will not have to play the guessing game of trying different date ranges to generate a valid report. To do this, create a new dataset.

Read More...

A good book and the observer pattern for VB.Net

I am reading this very good book. It’s called Head first Design Patterns by Eric Freeman & Elisabeth Freeman. It covers all the basic design patterns an OO-developer could ever use. Actualy, if you are doing OO programming you might see that you were already using some of these patterns but didn’t know it. Alle the patterns are quite well explained in a simple matter. And we all know what Einstein said about explaining things simple.

Read More...

Copy SQL Server Database

With the type of databases that can be set to nightly or even weekly recovery points, the copy database task is ideal and a quick way to setup you DR services. Many times the copy database task is overlooked for tasks such as disaster/recovery and test or development resources. This task available is very useful for databases that primarily hold meta data or are relatively small in size. The company I am with now has 3 primary third party installations that have databases in size ranging from 500MB to only 2GB.

Read More...

SQL Friday, The Best SQL Server Links Of The Past Week Episode 17

Time for another episode of the SQL Friday, The Best SQL Server Links Of The Past Week show, the Good Friday edition. Here is what I found interesting this past week in SQL Land: Updated Errors may occur after configuring Analysis Services to use Kerberos authentication on Advanced Encryption Standard Aware Operating Systems The PSS SQL Server Engineers explain what causes this, here is just a part of the post

Read More...

Send Excel formatted query results on schedules

Managers and users love Excel. We cannot get around it, no matter how horrid it is to load and work with Excel from a systems stand point. In the goals of automating our lives so we can be lazy DBA’s, you’re going to want to look into Database Mail to do this type of task. Why not? Database Mail is one of the best upgraded features of SQL Server 2005+. Remember what we went through to do something as simplistic as sending an email prior?

Read More...

SQL Server Agent Job history purging

Most often early in a DBA’s career they will go off on a job creation spree. This is actually good. I’ve always gone with the feeling that nothing cannot be automated. The agent gives us that freedom of automation and notification on tasks. Schedules can be robust, most tasks can be run and you can strategically manage tasks to prevent them from tripping over each other. The problem that you may run into is a poorly configured SQL Server Agent.

Read More...