What Does PASS Stand For? How Do You Answer That Question?

This past weekend I was at the 10th annual Orlando Code Camp as a speaker, attendee, and helping staff the PASS/oPASS/Magic table along with Kendal Van Dyke and Shawn McGehee. We had a prime table location and we talked to quite a few people. Many knew about the local groups and SQLSaturday, many did not, […]

SSC Editorial: First Episodes

First Episodes was published last week and by design was a less than serious topic with hopefully broad appeal. I like that SSC runs some non-technical, not-serious editorials sometimes. It’s a way for everyone to remember, or appreciate perhaps, that we often share common interests and attributes outside of work, and that those external influences […]

Big Data Techcon

I was reading SD Times and saw a nice 2 page ad for the Big Data Techcon coming up April 26th in Boston. I did a quick look at the schedule and I don’t see any SQL Server content or speakers from Microsoft. I wonder why not? Too late for me to consider attending it […]

Setting the Retention Limits for the OperationsManagerDW Database

For once an easy problem to solve! We needed to change the retention values for OperationsManagerDW (SCOM uses OperationsManager as the main store, this is the data warehouse) and it was surprisingly easy using the notes from Understanding and modifying Data Warehouse retention and grooming. Download a utility, unzip (no install), copy/paste the commands into […]

SSC Editorial: Mastery – Repetition, Variations, and Depth

Mastery – Repetition, Variations, and Depth was published yesterday and as you can surmise is about learning, one of my favorite topics. I’m not sure we teach the realities to those new to our profession. We can’t learn it all, know it all, master it all. We can’t measure our career by what we don’t […]

Thoughts on The SQL New Blogger Challenge

Ed Leighton-Dick published a challenge for new bloggers (or those who haven’t blogged in a while) to do one post a week during April. Great post, great reason for it, and I hope that many of you will give it a try. Read his post first! Some thoughts for those of you that are brand […]

Splitting Out The List of TFS Checked Out Files

Needed a quick fix this week to build on Finding Checked Out Files in TFS. That one line TF.exe call gets the list of all the checked out files. For this task I just needed to find files checked out to a handful of people and generated a file for each, mostly just to do […]

Notes on Setting Up & Troubleshooting Reporting Services Using Kerberos

Not comprehensive, but perhaps useful next time: Verify that the SPN’s are correct for the server that has the Reporting Services database. Many ways to do this, but I like the Kerberos Configuration Manager. The SPN tab should show “Good” for the instance that hosts the database. If not, fix (typically requires domain admin). Don’t […]

Stats Generated By Database Tuning Advisor

I ran across a thread about statistics being up to date and part of it was about stats generated by DTA (see the comment by Aaron Bertrand). Easy to identify: select db_name() as dbname, name from sys.stats where name like ‘_dta_stat%’ Are they being used? Drop them? Assuming autostats is on, the only risk would […]

Growing New Speakers By Sharing The Stage

It’s easy to forget, or not get at all, how intimidating it can be to take the first step into public speaking, and more than that, how devastating it can be if that first effort goes badly. I’ve long been an advocate of providing some coaching or training to first timers. If you’re going to […]

SQLAndy

Month: March 2015