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• Transactional replication and massive data updates

  SQL Server transactional replication has been a rather solid feature and works well for delivering data to reporting servers (among other things) in near real time. That said, it may not work too well when you need to perform massive updates on a published Read More... Posted Thursday, October 06, 2011 1:19 AM by Linchi Shea | 4 Comments Filed under: Performance, Scripting, Replication

• Scripting for the out-of-band attention

  I have written a lot of throw-away scripts, some of which were written to control the execution of a large number of SQL scripts. The logic of these control scripts is often simple, but their execution can last for a long time (e.g. hours). When writing Read More... Posted Saturday, November 20, 2010 10:53 PM by Linchi Shea | 0 Comments Filed under: Best Practices, Scripting, Automation

• Logging for post-processing

  As a practicing database professional, I'm sure you have done a lot of logging, I mean, output and/or error logging from your scripts, your scheduled jobs, and any other programs you might have written. The primary purpose of logging, of course, is to Read More... Posted Wednesday, November 17, 2010 3:31 PM by Linchi Shea | 3 Comments Filed under: Scripting, Automation, Deadlock

• Add-Content and Out-File are not for performance

  When you write Powershell scripts and need to write a text file, you have a number of ways to accomplish that. The often suggested approach is to use cmdlets Add-Content or Out-File. Well, this is not news. But some may not notice that these cmdlets are Read More... Posted Monday, January 04, 2010 5:31 PM by Linchi Shea | 3 Comments Filed under: Performance, Scripts, Scripting, Powershell

• Get an overview report on your log shipping setups

  [Updated Dec 23 to include a T-SQL script at the bottom of the post]. You may have an environment where log shipping is set up on various databases between various servers. Would it be handy to have an overview report highlighting which database is being Read More... Posted Monday, December 21, 2009 10:45 PM by Linchi Shea | 3 Comments Filed under: Perl, Scripting, Automation, Log shipping Attachment(s): scanForLogshipping.zip

• Performance impact: Speeding up SMO script generation

  Generating scripts through SMO can be as simple as walking down the database object tree and applying the Script() method to each scriptable object. Well, that is until you start to try it on a database that has a large number of objects (say a few thousands), Read More... Posted Sunday, December 13, 2009 6:18 PM by Linchi Shea | 7 Comments Filed under: Performance, Scripts, Scripting, SMO Attachment(s): MultiThreadSMO.GIF

• Find the complete call tree for a stored procedure

  Would it be nice to print out the complete call tree of a stored procedure? By complete call tree , I mean the following: · At the very top level, the call tree should identify all the procedures that are called directly. · For any given level, the next Read More... Posted Friday, October 23, 2009 12:11 AM by Linchi Shea | 4 Comments Filed under: Scripts, Perl, Tools, T-SQL, Scripting, Automation, Linked server Attachment(s): spCallTree.zip

• T-SQL Exercise: Simplest data-loading script to produce worst query performance – May 25th Update

  This is a quick update on the T-SQL exercise I posted a few days ago. The goal was to write a simple T-SQL script to generate and load 4,000,000 rows into a table so that the following query would produce the worst performance, i.e. take longest time Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 26, 2009 9:52 AM by Linchi Shea | 5 Comments Filed under: Performance, Scripts, Storage, Scripting, Disk I/O

• T-SQL Exercise: Simplest data-loading script to produce worst query performance

  Here is a T-SQL scripting exercise in case you have a few minutes to spare or are bored with whatever else you are doing. Objective The task is to write a simple T-SQL script to generate and load 4,000,000 rows into a test table. The objective is to make Read More... Posted Friday, May 22, 2009 4:21 PM by Linchi Shea | 19 Comments Filed under: Performance, Scripts, Storage, Scripting, Query Processing, Disk I/O

• How does that AD user account get access to the database?

  Granting Active Directory (AD) groups access to a database can quickly become complex when the AD groups may nest many levels. Consider the following scenario: You are requested to give Joe the same access to a database as John has. You look up John in Read More... Posted Thursday, March 26, 2009 2:19 AM by Linchi Shea | 8 Comments Filed under: Scripts, Scripting, Security

• Executing a large number of SQL scripts

  Say, you are given a large number of scripts underneath the following directory tree: N:\Apps\Release\PRS\PR12345\CMP1\procs \views \triggers \CMP2\procs \views \scripts You need to execute these scripts on a SQL Server instance. To simplify the matter Read More... Posted Thursday, December 04, 2008 9:15 PM by Linchi Shea | 18 Comments Filed under: Scripts, Perl, Scripting, Automation

• Microsoft 2008 Winter Scripting Games

  Microsoft is running its 3rd annual Winter Scripting Games. Three languages are allowed: VBScript, PowerShell, and Perl. The event sounds interesting. Check it out at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/funzone/games/default.mspx I didn't know Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 12:40 PM by Linchi Shea | 3 Comments Filed under: Scripting