MSSQL

Presenting at DBA Virtual Chapter Tomorrow

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ April 27, 2010 ⋅ 3 comments

Tomorrow at Noon EDT I will be presenting on SQL Server 2008 Audit. It will be similar to the talk I gave this past weekend at SQL Saturday #39. I will need to make some changes because it is a much different dynamic to present virtually as opposed to being with a group of people [...]

24 Hours of PASS: Celebrating SQL Server 2008 R2

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ April 5, 2010 ⋅ 4 comments

I am happy to write this semi-official announcement regarding the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS event to be held on May 19th and 20th. This is the second event of this type that PASS has put together and the first one that I have had the privilege to help pull together. I know that I [...]

Find Tables That Are Missing a Clustered Index

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ March 31, 2010 ⋅ 6 comments

Today I had the need to find tables in a database that did not have a clustered index defined. Why would I have such a need? That’s a great question.
Anyway, I set about with a few basic questions for myself such as “Self, how many tables are there?” So I did what I normally do [...]

Cloud Computing Conference

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ March 5, 2010 ⋅ One comment

I took part in a one day conference today on cloud computing. It took place at the Harvard Club in Boston, which was an interesting choice to have the event. I had never been to the Harvard Club before, and I enjoyed the history displayed all around me. I did not wear a coat and [...]

Good Way To Start Your Day

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ February 23, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

I have a lot of things to read on a daily basis. Some of them are recreational, but most of them are aligned with my technical interests. It is rare for me to have the time to sit down and read one book from cover to cover. So I have started reading a handful of [...]

Backing Up SSAS Databases

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ January 5, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

As we get more involved with the BI stack of tools we find ourselves learning some of the nuances of supporting all of these new environments. One such example is SSAS. When people build and deploy cubes to an instance of SSAS they (eventually) get around to asking about restores and recovery. And since the [...]

SQL University Hoops Practice

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ October 30, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

OK folks, sorry about having to cancel practice last week but we didn’t want to take any chances with the current swine flu pandemic that is sure to be made into a TV movie to be shown during May sweeps next year. I know that many of you had a chance to practice on your [...]

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 Podcast – Part 3

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ August 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Brent and I sum up the podcast in this final piece. Trust us: PBM is awesome. It is a nice complement to your existing monitoring solutions. With a little T-SQL you can easily create your own policies on demand. Plus we also suggest that it might be time for others to join us in the [...]

Policy Based Management Podcast – Part 2

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ August 20, 2009 ⋅ 4 comments

Continuing from yesterday we have part two of our podcast where Brent and I continue our discussion of PBM.
In this part we discuss how to use Central Management Server to deploy one policy against multiple servers, show a major usability FAIL in the SSMS GUI, hear Brent say he will edit something out that he [...]