Accidental DBA Backup Question Tim Writes: I just inherited a 2000 SQL server with 3 databases and 4 system databases that are being backed up but I do not understand the sequence of the backup events. Under enterprise manager: at 6:00pm databases are frozen then thawed and database backups are taken by our cloud backup vendor. Then at 8:00pm a […]

Have You Checked Your Jobs Recently? Too many times when we’re reviewing a system to get our arms around what’s going on – we end up surprised by jobs that were relied on for processing, but that have long-since stopped working for whatever reason. This can really impair systems of course, and it usually ends up being one of those […]

SQL Server 2012 Rewind I’ve been reviewing some of the new features released in the SQL Server 2012 release. I thought I would remind myself from where we have come as the CTPs continue to progress for SQL Server 2014. There are a few more features than I remembered. After a while it all merges together. Two of my favorite […]

Data Security is Changing The revelations about the NSA, the scope of their data snooping and the vast amounts of information they watch are truly incredible. If you add to this the technology that’s been developed to do this task, you really have to stop and think. For example, do you really believe the current agencies doing this snooping are […]

A Data Merge Problem Here’s an interesting problem for you. A fellow asked the following question on a technical forum I follow, “How do I merge data from a remote source into my database?” The remote source provides data through an online API. He maintains a local database for those periods of time when the application is used without internet […]

SQL Puzzler Yesterday I shared this SQL Puzzler in my editorial: Here is a brain twister for you. What is the purpose of the + in the following SQL? WHERE ineStatus in ( + ‘P’, ‘O’, ‘D’) Ed wrote in with his ideas Thought I’d take a stab at the plus sign—might that be to somehow make an indirect reference? […]

SUBSTRING, LEN and DATALENGTH Today I was talking with a colleague asking a question regarding how the SUBSTRING function works in TSQL. The question was, “What happens if I specify a length greater than the number of characters in the string?” My response was that SQL Server doesn’t require the exact length for the number of bytes; so, if you […]

User Defined Types SQL Server has supported User Defined Types for a long time. With the release of SQL Server 2008 Microsoft introduced User Defined Table types which could be used as input parameters to stored procedures. This allows you to pass sets of data as input rather than having to use XML or strings which are parsed into table […]

What’s Checkpoint All About? Checkpoints can be very important to the health and performance of your Microsoft SQL Server. In order to optimize performance, modifications made to your database are first performed in Cache, and later persisted to disk. When a checkpoint occurs, cache is flushed to disk. Checkpoints when they occur are autonomous to a single database. For a […]

Indexing for Different Queries When you have a table that is queried using many different kinds of criteria it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to build a reasonable number of indexes supporting all the different queries. Most developers know that as you create more indexes on a table it slows down the performance of the table for creating or updating […]