I like Halloween so I find myself getting mentally ready each year about a couple of months prior. My mind turns to horrors and I must warn wary travelers in DBA-land about an evil I see all too often – shrinking a database.
I know this has been done to death but I still see it. Gather around the fire as I tell you the ills of shrinking database files.
On Saturday September 22nd I will be speaking at SQL Saturday San Diego presenting on 2 fun topics:
Read on about my presentations…
SQL Memes! I have put together a bunch of SQL Server, database related, general technology, and office memes. Some you may find funny and others perhaps not. That’s cool. You can post your own or comment here and I can evolve this over time.
Today I want to talk about some of the language settings in SQL Server and the impact they have. Read on to see about setting up a default language in SQL Server, setting language for a scoped session, and differences between SQL Server and Windows Server settings.
Cory Doctorow wrote an excellent piece about the disclosure of software security defects. The post “Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never, Ever, Ever Be Illegal. EVER.” spells out the current predicament and suggests a way forward.
This topic is contemporary, impactful, and fascinating. It spans various domains such as InfoSec, free speech, censorship, and private corporate rights
Read on as I analyze the article and offer my thoughts about security vulnerability disclosures.
Feature Image Attribution and License.
Every SQL Server instance relies heavily on tempdb to function. Because of this it is important to properly setup and configure tempdb. If you work on a system with a sub optimal tempdb setup then you may have to move files. Read on to see a technique for getting this job done.
Today I want to show off a quick trick I learned many years ago that is useful to this day.
The Scenario: you have a spreadsheet, CSV file, or some other delimited flat file and need to load that into a database. There are many options to load data into SQL Server; however, a quick method I am fond of is to use Microsoft Excel and manipulate the data to craft insert statements then paste into SSMS and execute.
Read on to see how to parse and load a CSV flat file, character delimited flat file, and columnar text.
In my previous post, SQL Server Database Corruption! Understanding and Diagnosing, we talked about database corruption. We discussed what it was so we could better understand the threat we face. Then we learned how to diagnose database corruption. Today we are going to talk about remediating and preventing database corruption.
If you haven’t already read the previous post please read it first.
Of all the things that can ruin your day as a DBA and possibly get you fired, database corruption ranks right up there with backups and security enforcement of the database. Database corruption can be a resume generating event! A corrupt database can affect system stability, lead to unnecessary downtime, and possibly the loss of some data. To manage the risk you must know what database corruption is, how to diagnose, how to fix, and how to prevent.
Read on to learn how to understand and diagnose database corruption.
UPDATE: Part 2 on Fixing Database Corruption