For today's entry (and after a brief side trip through my own experiences), I move just slightly out of the SQL realm to a Microsoft Clustering MVP. Ok, in reality he is very much a SQL Server expert/guru (having taught for the SQL Server 2008 Microsoft Certified Masters courses), and has been for many years. He just spends more of his (at least ...

So here it is the night of Thanksgiving Eve here in the United states, and some time tomorrow I will likely be extra stuffed with Turkey and fixin’s and have begun to prep to do some shopping on Black Friday (if not catatonic from the mythical wonder tryptophan. @mythbusters, there is one for you) However, this is not just a day for Ben Franklin’s ...

Ok, so you are the lead ______________ for your company.  The big cheese, the super duper guy who knows everything…right?  So then some newbie comes up with an idea that might solve a problem you have been dealing with for a few days/weeks/months/whatever.  What do you do? A. Ignore his idea and use your own, genetically superior ...

This ORM piece of tool just can't stop to surprise. A week ago I've found out that although NHibernate can execute stored procedure, it doesn't support output parameters - when procedure returns one, it causes failure. Today I've found another pearl. Imagine following scenario: 2 entities with many-to-many relationship between them. For example, ...

Edit: Added ideas from comments at the end of the blog Not exactly a SQL topic, but I am working on formatting a chapter from a book I am working on with a cowriter and I realized that there were a few things that I find myself doing over and over with Word that I wanted to share.  All of the tips are useful for formatting SQL in your blog ...

Disclaimer: I'm not an infrastructure DBA.Probably everything below is just bullshit. Recently our talented IT guys destroyed disk on a virtual machine. They chose the disk carefully - it was the one with master database. How do you restore master db from backup? Start SQL Server service from command line in single user mode and execute RESTORE ...

This post is inspired by recent post by Mladen Prajdić. Mladen had found out (as many did before him - hanging around in blogs and communities, I see questions about this issue from time to time) that name resolution works for temporary tables differs from the one for permanent tables. While for permanent table more than one CREATE TABLE statement ...

Recently I had to use GUID (Global Unique Identifier) as primary key in order to ensure cross-server uniqueness. In many cases surrogate key (some sort of concatenation between server id and intra-server identity) would give a better performance but in my case due to application requirements surrogate key wasn't an option. Next step is ...

1. Active-Active cluster. Like RAC in Oracle. Maximum that commodity server can provide by now is 4 quad-core CPU machine. If application requires more, we can split the database (which is not always possible; and even when it is - such a solution often looks very artificial) or buy high-end server with more CPUs and much higher price line. ...

Recently I've been asked by one of my clients to write a simple script that would find out whether particular database had ever been backed up (full backup). The reason for a requirement was semi-automatic application which would enable end users to manage backup activity including manually backup transaction log - not via Management Studio but ...