A user on StackOverflow had populated a custom schema with a bunch of tables, and needed to replace them with a new set of tables due to various changes. But he couldn't just drop them all in any arbitrary order, because there were foreign keys in place. His workaround was to just run a ''drop all tables'' script multiple times until there were no ...

  Brad Anderson just completed a keynote in Las Vegas at the Microsoft Management Summit 2011 and announced the new name for what was originally called Project Atlanta. Dot da da dah… And the new name is:  System Center Advisor.  You can find much more information at www.SystemCenterAdvisor.com.  The product also goes from a ...

I've complained about sp_MSforeachdb before.  In part of my ''Bad Habits to Kick'' series in 2009-10, I described how I worked around its sporadic inability to actually process all of the databases on an instance: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2010/02/08/bad-habits-to-kick-relying-on-undocumented-behavior.aspx I ...

The SQL Server support team just announced the release of a backup simulator. Many 3rd party utilities that do backup like IBM Tivoli, Symantec BackupExec, Quest Litespeed, Redgate SQL Backup etc. use the sqlvdi.dll to communicate to SQL Server and this allows you to simulate that activity. So if you want to test how your system reacts or more ...

''Never'' is a strong word, so let me say that we really really want to avoid it, if at all humanly possible. In short, we will have a (potentially) broken database, both at the physical level and at the logical level. Read on. Just to be clear, when I refer to a ''log file'' here, I'm talking about a transaction log file, an .ldf file. Ever so ...

Ola has a set of stored procedures to do maint operations, see http://ola.hallengren.com/. Ola has now updated them to support exclusions or inclusions of tables, indexes or even whole schemas from index rebuild/reorg. Check out http://ola.hallengren.com/Documentation.html#SelectingIndexes for info on how to define exclusions and ...

Do you know where SQL Server is installed - everywhere it is installed?  Do you really know where SQL Server is installed?  Are you looking for a tool that will help you discover any rogue instances so you can better manage these instances?  The Beta 2 for the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now open. Join ...

Periodically I back up the keys within my servers and databases, and when I do, I blog a reminder here. This should be part of your standard backup rotation – the keys should be backed up often enough to have at hand and again when they change. The first key you need to back up is the Service Master Key, which each Instance already has built-in. ...

I've just updated the ''Agent Alerts Management Pack'' found here. I realize that some don't feel confident in reading and executing T-SQL code and they instead prefer to point & click in SSMS instead. So I added two tables with my suggestion on the severity levels and error numbers to define alerts for.

I'm working on a PowerShell script to show me the trending durations of my backup activities. The first thing I need is the data, so I looked at the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio, and found a report that suited my needs, so I pulled out the script that it runs and modified it to this T-SQL Script. A few words here - you need ...