Windows Azure is a platform that allows you to write software, run software, or use software that we've already written. We provide lots of resources to help you do that - many can be found right here in this blog series. There are two primary resources you can use, and it's important to understand what they are and what they do. The Windows ...

It happens to me at least once a week – I want to check progress of some heavy script that runs in chunks over big dataset and find out that it writes intermediate data to temporary table only. Last time it happened 3 days ago when I wanted to analyze 50GB trace table on my notebook. I wrote a script that was taking 200 thousand rows at a time, ...

I’ve just released three new scripts of my “sys2” script collection that can be found on CodePlex: Project Page: http://sys2dmvs.codeplex.com/ Source Code Download: http://sys2dmvs.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/57732 The three new scripts are the following sys2.database_backup_info.sql sys2.query_memory_grants.sql ...

This is a very simple script - but it's one I run each morning. It searches the Windows System Event Log for an error condition. You can replace ''System'' here with ''Application'' or ''Security'', or any of the other logs that are created on your Windows Server. This is run at the server, since I have each server check itself and make a file of ...

One interesting observation that may help developers get convinced that they should parametrize query and that they must check that the ORM they use does it correctly is show how much memory can be wasted by plans that cannot be effectively reused. The following query can help on this: with cte as (     select ...

I use Extended Properties on databases and their objects all the time. They are a great way to include information about the object – I use them for versioning the database, detailing what a column is used for and so on. They can be a little tricky to set, but it’s really not bad once you learn how.  Ken Simmons, a SQL Server MVP ...

Someone contacted me yesterday and said they were getting blocked when they tried to create a FileStream data column type. On investigation, I found they were Mirroring that database – and the two aren’t compatible. Which got me to thinking – it’s probably a good idea to make a “check script” as you investigate tacking on a new feature, column ...

SQL Server used to have  cool little tool that would let you track your licenses. Microsoft didn’t use it to limit your system or anything, it was just a place on the server where you could put that this system used this license key. I miss those days – we don’t track that any more, and I want to make sure I’m up to date on my licensing, so I ...

Once upon a time it was 2004, and I wrote what I have to say was a pretty cool little script. (Yes, I know the post is dated 2006, but that's because I dropped the ball and failed to back-date the posts when I moved them over here from my prior blog space.) The impetus for creating this script was (and is) simple: Changing keys can be a painful ...

I read this interesting article on using PowerShell and the registry, and thought I would modify his information a bit to list the SQL Server Instances on a box. The interesting thing about listing instances this was is that you can touch remote machines, find the instances when they are off and so on. Anyway, here’s the scriptlet I used to find ...