(Note: I have re-written parts of this post in the light of the comments that SP1 of 2012 include Complete tools.)  I have decided to revisit the topic of whats included in Express Edition, with focus on the tools. I have a couple of reasons for this: In my 2011 post, I never tried to connect from Express SSMS to a non-Express ...

''So what bad has this option done?'', you probably as yourself. Well, not much, but I find it evil because it confuses people, especially those new to SQL Server. I have many times seen people specifying something like 3, and expect SQL Server to keep the three most recent backups in the backup file and overwrite everything which is older than ...

How often do you do this? Look over each message (type) in the errorlog file and determine whether this is something you want to act on. Sure, some (but not all) of you have some monitoring solution in place, but are you 100% confident that it really will notify for all messages that you might find interesting? That there isn't even one little ...

In the past 24 hours I have come across two bugs that can be quite problematic in certain environments. LPIM issue with SetFileIoOverlappedRange Last night the CSS team posted a blog entry detailing a potential issue with Lock Pages in Memory and Windows' SetFileIoOverlappedRange API. I tweeted about it at the time, but thought it could use a ...

After executing a job, I want to have an email with the following information:Success or failure in the mail subject (not just in the body)Success or failure and execution time for each job step in mail bodyHave output file(s) for the job steps attached to emailAgent has none of above built-in so I created my own procedure for this. This is meant ...

Yep, another Agent blog. The topic of job owner has been discussed here before, but this is a specific situation, which potentially is a ticking bomb. First a quick recap of how agent does things: When a job is owned by somebody who is sysadmin, then no impersonation is performed. T-SQL jobsteps will be executed as Agent's own Windows ...

I have updated the Agent Alerts Management Pack, cleaned up the T-SQL code which creates the alerts. You can now just copy, paste and execute that code. Earlier, for some of the some of the alert definitions it just generated the calls to the query result window, and you had to copy this to a query window and execute it. Now you just copy the code ...

This can for instance be very useful if you want to keep track how long time things take, over time. Check them out here.Version history here.

Just a short notice that I've released an article about moving databases between SQL Server instances: You find it at http://www.karaszi.com/SQLServer/info_moving_database.asp.

This week I have collected five important bugs involving Management Studio, and I hope you'll visit them, provide input and vote on the ones you think are worthwhile. #651176 : SSMS tries to access disconnected network drives when in the Save File As wizardPaul Randal (blog | twitter) filed this issue when he experienced significant delays trying ...