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• Express Edition revisited, focus on SSMS

  (Note: I have re-written parts of this post in the light of the comments that SP1 of 2012 include Complete tools.) I have decided to revisit the topic of whats included in Express Edition, with focus on the tools. I have a couple of reasons for this: Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 30, 2013 7:01 PM by TiborKaraszi | 3 Comments Filed under: Tools, Trace, SQL Server Agent, Express Edition

• Backup and the evil RETAINDAYS option

  "So what bad has this option done?", you probably as yourself. Well, not much, but I find it evil because it confuses people, especially those new to SQL Server. I have many times seen people specifying something like 3, and expect SQL Server to keep Read More... Posted Sunday, July 08, 2012 3:25 PM by TiborKaraszi | 4 Comments Filed under: Tools, Backup, Maintenance, datetime, SQL Server Agent

• Analyzing the errorlog

  How often do you do this? Look over each message (type) in the errorlog file and determine whether this is something you want to act on. Sure, some (but not all) of you have some monitoring solution in place, but are you 100% confident that it really Read More... Posted Thursday, July 05, 2012 2:53 PM by TiborKaraszi | 0 Comments Filed under: Tools, Maintenance, Installation, Troubleshooting, SQL Server Agent

• SQL Live Monitor

  I just found this one out there and wanted to share it. It connects to an instance and show you a bunch of figures. Nothing you can't extract yourself with SQL queries, but sometimes it is just nice to have one tool which is very easy to use. Here's what Read More... Posted Saturday, November 19, 2011 10:46 AM by TiborKaraszi | 1 Comments Filed under: Tools, Performance

• Ola Hallengren's maint procedures now supports logging to table

  This can for instance be very useful if you want to keep track how long time things take, over time. Check them out here .Version history here . Read More... Posted Saturday, July 16, 2011 4:19 AM by TiborKaraszi | 1 Comments Filed under: Tools, Maintenance, SQL Server Agent

• Another bugfix for sp_indexinfo

  JackMcC reported correctly at http://sqlblog.com/blogs/tibor_karaszi/archive/2009/02/18/sp-indexinfo-updated.aspx that sp_indexinfo will count rows double (or even tripple) if there are lob or row overflow allocations. Now fixed. Thanks Jack. Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 09, 2010 10:26 AM by TiborKaraszi | 0 Comments Filed under: Tools, indexes

• New util proc: sp_tableinfo

  Some of you might use my sp_indexinfo to easily get lots of details about the indexes in a database. I added an sp_tableinfo with info rolled up to table level. This allow to quickly see the largest tables in a database and things like that. Check it Read More... Posted Sunday, October 10, 2010 2:59 PM by TiborKaraszi | 2 Comments Filed under: Tools

• Util procedure to show database size

  One of the first things I want to do when I look at a new SQL Server is to get an idea of space usage details for each database, including total space usage. For this I have been using my own sp_db_space_usage for a while now, so I decided to add it to Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 29, 2009 2:17 PM by TiborKaraszi | 6 Comments Filed under: Tools

• Spooky: What do you connect to?

  I only recently discovered that SSMS will connect to different things. For instance, press the "New query" button. What were you connected to? The answer is the same server as your "current" server. But what is the current server? It is the server where Read More... Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 5:12 PM by TiborKaraszi | 2 Comments Filed under: Tools, SQL Server 2008

• Management Pack for SQL Agent Alerts

  I have finished my article about suggested SQL Server Agent Alerts. Perhaps calling this a "Management Pack" is OTT, but hopefully it will be useful to some of you folks. We are talking about having Agent sending email to us when SQL Server writes messages Read More... Posted Monday, June 01, 2009 10:05 PM by TiborKaraszi | 4 Comments Filed under: Tools, Troubleshooting, SQL Server Agent

• sp_altermessage is back in business!

  Just a quick note that we again can modify whether system messages are to go to eventlog/errorlog again. I.e., we can change the is_event_logged column in sys.messages. This is very valuable in general and specifically is you want to define Agent alerts Read More... Posted Thursday, May 14, 2009 11:36 PM by TiborKaraszi | 2 Comments Filed under: Tools, Maintenance, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server Agent

• Match those types!

  This is a recommendation I believe is worth repeating from time to time: Make sure you match data types when you write TSQL code. Else you in most cases end up with an implicit data type conversion. And in worst case, this conversion is performed at the Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 28, 2009 1:30 PM by TiborKaraszi | 17 Comments Filed under: Tools, Performance, indexes, Trace, Troubleshooting

• Update of SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack

  I just learned (thanks Josefin) that we now have an update of the SQL Server 2008 feature pack - the October "edition". Stuff like download of command-line tools, driver for PHP, native client, sync framework, upgrade advisor, bunch of BI related utilities Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008 6:56 PM by TiborKaraszi | 1 Comments Filed under: Tools

• Rebuild master in SQL Server 2008

  You might have read an earlier blog entry about my problems to remove a Data Collector (DC) information in SQL Server 2008. I still haven't found any info on how to do this, but my questions in the MVP group triggered some activity. Bob Ward looked into Read More... Posted Friday, August 29, 2008 9:18 PM by TiborKaraszi | 2 Comments Filed under: Tools, Backup, Installation

• Missing F8 or ctrl-N in SSMS 2008?

  Short story: Turn on 2000 keyboard layout and then back to Standard layout. Long story: This topic has been discussed in both the MCT (MS Certified Trainer) as well as MVP groups. Also, see http://sqlblog.com/blogs/andy_leonard/archive/2008/08/08/sql-server-2008-management-studio-function-keys.aspx Read More... Posted Tuesday, August 26, 2008 10:22 AM by TiborKaraszi | 8 Comments Filed under: Tools, SQL Server 2008