MSSQLTips

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SQL Server Audit Tips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ March 10, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I had two tips go live this past week over at MSSQLTips, both with regards to the SQL Server Audit feature in SQL 2008. The first tip shows how to enable SQL Server Audit. The second tip shows how to use the AUDIT_CHANGE_GROUP to monitor changes to your audit configurations. Some people would call that [...]

Two Things To Tell You

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ March 3, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I have three things to tell you today.
First, I have a new article over at MSSQLTips.com, this one on configuring a SQL Server 2008 Audit. Head over there and check it out, I give the details you need in order to get your instance configured for auditing.
Second, and somewhat related, I have submitted a session [...]

New Tip Posted

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ February 9, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I had another tip posted over at MSSQLTips today, you can find it at http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1938
The tip helps you configure a policy inside of PBM that will help you to determine how badly your transaction logs are fragmented.

New Tip at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ January 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Linked server configurations are often overlooked when it comes to environmental baselines. I don’t know of too many people who go out of their way to track such details. And I have often been surprised by vendor software packages that claim to track system changes but do not include linked server information.
One thing about linked [...]

New Tip Over at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ October 18, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Ever have a customer request that you take a backup of a database, a restore using that backup, and then tell you that it is the wrong data?
Every now and then it happens, so I decided to put together some t-sql to display details on what was done. The script essentially details when the restored was [...]

Policy Based Management Tip at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ August 13, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I had another tip go live over at MSSQLTips today, this one involves the use of Policy Based Management to verify that your backup files are still available on disk. I had recently published a similar tip that was just a script that used the undocumented stored procedure xp_fileexist to achieve the same goal. I [...]

Another tip at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ July 24, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

I had a tip published over at MSSQLTips yesterday and wanted to drop a quick post to brag tell people about it. The tip is very straightforward, it uses xp_fileexist to verify if your database dumps are still on disk or not.
Keep in mind that xp_fileexist is one of those undocumented stored procedures, which is [...]

Want a Free Trip to PASS?

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ July 22, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

I have previously noted on this blog that I write for MSSQLTips. As such, I wanted to tell you about a prize that MSSQLTips and Idera are sponsoring: an all expenses paid trip to the PASS Community Summit in November 2009.
Here are the details – http://www.mssqltips.com/pass_giveaway_entry.asp
That’s correct, you can win a trip to PASS! Go and [...]

MSSQLTips – Backup History Tip

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 9, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

A few weeks back I was asked how long a backup took for a specific database. I knew the info was in the msdb somewhere so I pieced together a bit of code and then thought to myself “hey, this might be a good thing to share with others at MSSQLTips”. Well, OK, I actually [...]

Now Writing for MSSQLTips.com

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ April 7, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Every now and then I see requests come to our team that say “hey, buddy, when was the last time that database was restored?” My first thought has been, historically, “how the hell am I supposed to know that?” After all, the management tools given to us (EM, SSMS) never list a “last restore date” [...]

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