It seems like every week I get hit up with some kind of “Its a view only for this specific report,” or “It is a simple change that the vendor would have made if they had access” type of request related to SQL Server.  If you’ve never dealt with me, let me start off this blog post by saying that I am a staunch advocate of Change Control ...

SQL Server users love the new features inside of the platform and each new release brings more exciting enhancements that motivate end users towards upgrading from previous editions.  However, one of the biggest gripes I see from the SQL Server Community is that the hot new features are primarily Enterprise Edition only.  Today I read a ...

While working on a problem today I happened to think about what the impact to startup might be for a really large tempdb transaction log file.  Its fairly common knowledge that data files in SQL Server 2005+ on Windows Server 2003+ can be instant initialized, but the transaction log files can not.  If this is news to you see the ...

Robert Davis(blog/twitter) recently blogged The Toilet Analogy … or Why I Never Recommend Increasing Worker Threads, in which he uses an analogy for why increasing the value for the ‘max worker threads’ sp_configure option can be bad inside of SQL Server.  While I can’t make an argument against Robert’s assertion that increasing worker ...

This morning I was late to work because as I backed out of the driveway I noticed that my wife's car had a flat tire.  This should be a pretty simple thing to fix, but it turns out that the spare tire was also flat.  This too should have been an easy fix because I have a 60 gallon air compressor standing in the corner of my garage that ...

Here’s another use for the information captured by the default trace.  Ever wonder what session created the tables that exist in tempdb?  Well you can find it using the default trace and the sys.objects view in tempdb.  Any time an object is created in a database, EventClass 46 (Object:Created) is captured in the trace output of the ...

Its funny to see this new technical note posted by the SQLCAT team today because we just recently had a discussion about this on Twitter.  My good friend Sankar Reddy (Blog/Twitter) sent me an IM with the link to this page based on the twitter discussions.  Essentially, the problem deals with inserts into a table with a identity column ...

Due to dependency requirements I had to split this tool into two separate tools one for SQL Server 2005, and one for SQL Server 2008 today, and I have reposted the newer builds on the codeplex site: http://sqlblockedprocessmon.codeplex.com/ one build is specific for SQL Server 2005, and can be used if all you have installed on the machine that ...

If you have a named instance of SQL Server and you need to create a Linked Server to it, using the SQL Native Client will result in a Linked Server like SQLDEMO\SQLEXPRESS.  This isn't ideal for coding against.  One thing that you can do is create a Client Configuration Alias to provide a common name for the instance that you want to ...