Merrill Aldrich

SQL Saturday 108 Redmond PowerShell Session Material

merrillaldrich — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:43:24 GMT

I am honored to be presenting my first SQL Saturday session in Redmond on the 25th of this month. The session will be a PowerShell basics class, emphasis on helping people who might be starting out with PowerShell, or feel intimidated by PowerShell’s...(read more)

One Database or Ten?

merrillaldrich — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:36:09 GMT

In my career to date I’ve worked as a DBA for mainly “buy don’t build” scenarios. One advantage - and hair-graying problem, if I am honest - has been that I think I’ve seen upward of one or two hundred different ISV-provided applications’ SQL Server databases....(read more)

T-SQL Tuesday 24: Ode to Composable Code

merrillaldrich — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 06:54:05 GMT

I love the T-SQL Tuesday tradition, started by Adam Machanic and hosted this month by Brad Shulz . I am a little pressed for time this month, so today’s post is a short ode to how I love saving time with Composable Code in SQL. Composability is one of...(read more)

PASS Summit: What’s the Shape of the Future?

merrillaldrich — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:53:53 GMT

Gushing First I have to gush a little about the PASS Summit. Skip ahead if you like - this type of stuff doesn’t make for the best reading, and I won’t be offended. The Summit was amazing as ever this year. The thing I love about it, in addition to just...(read more)

SCOM, 90 days in, IV. Fixing that SQL Agent Job thing. Yeah, that.

merrillaldrich — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:08:22 GMT

OK, we’re way over 90 days in with our SCOM implementation, but I picked a title theme, and now we’re kind of stuck with the title. In any case, today is a short and to-the-point post about how to get Agent jobs alerting on failure through Operations...(read more)

How to Run a Series of T-SQL Scripts in a Specific Order

merrillaldrich — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:36:37 GMT

Another post in the handy-but-not-bleeding-edge category. In the past few months I’ve seen a number of folks struggle with how to reliably/repeatedly execute a heap of T-SQL Script files, in order. One could certainly argue about why there’s the need...(read more)

Dear SQL Tools Team(s): Stop Starting Over. Seriously.

merrillaldrich — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:52:20 GMT

I have two little boys at home, and my parents were both teachers. It gives me a strange relationship with our public schools – I am passionate about them, and the quality of education I want for my kids, but I have to keep my distance a little, lest...(read more)

Handy Trick: Move Rows in One Statement

merrillaldrich — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:44:22 GMT

Today I am posting a wee 200-level trick, taken from some work I am doing with archiving. Here’s the scenario: I have seen a few applications that have performance problems where “active” records in the database are comingled with “inactive” records....(read more)

Chasing the ISV, or, “That code makes my teeth hurt.” T-SQL Tuesday (ish) #21

merrillaldrich — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:00:00 GMT

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday – a blog party dreamed up by sqlblog.com’s Adam Machanic ( blog | @ AdamMachanic ) – is about that code we’ve all written that we don’t really like to think about too often. You know the stuff. I can’t help but imagine the next...(read more)

It’s 2011: Do you know where your SA credentials are?

merrillaldrich — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:44:06 GMT

Today I am assisting a vendor with an upgrade / migration, as is very common in my work. I am amazed to still see the following practices in place with software vendors, even today, even after so many well-publicized data breaches. We’ve done what we...(read more)

T-SQL Tuesday #19: Blind Spots

merrillaldrich — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 05:31:59 GMT

A while ago I wrote a post, Visualize Disaster , prompted by a real incident we had at my office. Fortunately we came through it OK from a business point of view, but I took away an important lesson: it’s very easy, whether your organization and your...(read more)

Flash-y Re-index: Why Defrag on SSD’s?

merrillaldrich — Fri, 27 May 2011 23:56:03 GMT

Some time ago, I blogged about how to really comprehensively re-index a data warehouse: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/merrill_aldrich/archive/2009/08/09/hexagonal-close-packing-for-your-fact-data.aspx . (Wow, 2009. Time flies.) Today I am reviving that old...(read more)

Case Study: Secure Log Shipping via SSL FTP

merrillaldrich — Fri, 20 May 2011 00:12:21 GMT

Today I’m putting up sort of an oddball solution I build a couple of months ago. We had the need to provide a reporting copy of some production databases for analysts to do ad-hoc reporting. The trick was that we needed to move the databases from a less...(read more)

Scandalous II: Shh! I am De-duplicating Compressed Backups

merrillaldrich — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 05:01:50 GMT

This is part II of two Scandalous posts . Watch, mouth agape, as I run with scissors, right up against prevailing wisdom! Unfollow me now, before it’s too late! Here’s the thing. There are two really outstanding posts out there on the ‘tubez that explain...(read more)

Top Tools I Didn’t Know I Needed as a DBA

merrillaldrich — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 23:01:01 GMT

Today’s post is an unabashedly subjective plug for a bunch of unrelated tools I have come to rely on and love. I’m not really a “tools guy,” so there are no doubt better and worse tools for these tasks out there. I’m not affiliated with any of the vendors...(read more)