sql2xls goes cross-platform
Last year I released sql2xls, a free open-source tool which lets you throw a bunch of scripts into a folder, run them automatically against SQL Server and get the results back in a nicely-formatted Excel…
On the continuity of business
With entire countries shutting their borders, and people being forced to stay home and isolate themselves for as long as possible while health departments ramp up to handle this pandemic, the question of business continuity…
Join me in Victoria this Saturday
I will be presenting a new session, “Database administration through the ages,” at SQL Saturday #950 in Victoria this coming weekend. This is one of my favourite SQL Saturdays of the year because I love…
Deprecated and discontinued features in SQL Server
My co-authors and I recently wrapped up the book SQL Server 2019 Administration Inside Out, which should be hitting the shelves in the next week or two. At the end of Chapter 1 I have…
Join me at SQLBits 2020 (maybe)
(Last edited on March 11, 2020) The SQLBits conference, which was to take place in London between March 31st and April 4th, has been postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. SQLBits will now take place…
Disaster recovery, tools edition
I just completed a chapter for another book where I spoke about the Recovery Point Objective (how much data you are prepared to lose) and Recovery Time Objective (how long you have to bring your…
Dealing with rejection
“Dear speaker This serves as notice that your session submission was not selected for our upcoming event. We had a lot of sessions to sort through, and unfortunately there were not enough spots available to…
I’m a DBA. Do I really need to know Kubernetes?
Welcome to February 2020. It’s the second month of the year 2020! I remember sitting at a server with SQL Server 6.5 installed on it, worrying about the Y2K bug. It feels like yesterday. While…
What is a strong password anyway?
Background Fellow Microsoft MVP Troy Hunt (blog | Twitter) has been operating the website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) for a number of years now. For the record, “pwned” is pronounced like “owned” but with a…
My home office setup
That aging hippie (he likes Apple products and has a goatee) known as Brent Ozar wrote a post recently about his home office studio setup, with a big focus on bragging about his admittedly really…
Don’t install SQL Server from a mounted ISO
Here’s something that seems to keep coming up, but not frequently enough for me to write a blog post about until now: You should not install SQL Server from a mounted ISO file. Instead, you…
The curious case of the sqlcmd password
In August last year I posted about a command line parser problem I ran into with AzCopy, which I eventually resolved by writing a batch file and escaping a number of characters in the access…
Looking ahead to 2020
This week all I want to say is Happy New Year, and may 2020 be the start of a successful decade for you. Live, love, learn. Remember to take some time off to play. Thank…
Temporal Tables, and how to deal with computed columns
Long time readers will know I’m a big fan of Temporal Tables since their introduction in SQL Server 2016. Thanks to my friend Erik Darling (blog | Twitter), I can share a tip when dealing…
Compression in SQL Server: COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS
On Twitter recently, I asked: Does anyone I know use the COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS features in T-SQL? To those who replied in the affirmative, I asked: What made you decide on this as opposed to…