MSSQLTips

New Tip Over at MSSQLTips

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

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

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?

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

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

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” [...]