SQLServer

One of the things I hate the most about “old” databases is the fact that unused tables are kept forever, because nobody knows whether they’re used or not. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell. Some databases are accessed by a huge number of applications, reports, ETL tools and God knows what else. In these cases, deciding whether you should drop a table or not is a tough call. Search your codebase The easiest way to know if a table is used, is to search the codebase for occurences of the table name. [Read More]

Next week, on Saturday 28, make sure you don’t miss SQLSaturday Pordenone! Pordenone is the place where the Italian adventure with SQLSaturday started, more than two years ago. It was the beginning of a journey that brought many SQLSaturdays to Italy, with our most successful one in Parma last November. Now we’re back in Pordenone to top that result! We have a fantastic schedule for this event, with a great speaker lineup and great topics for the sessions. [Read More]

Some weeks ago I blogged about the discouraging signals coming from Connect and my post started a discussion that didn’t go very far. Instead it died quite soon: somebody commented the post and ranted about his Connect experience. I’m blogging again about Connect, but I don’t want to start a personal war against Microsoft: today I want to look at what happened from a new perspective. What I find disappointing is a different aspect of the reactions from the SQL Server community, which made me think that maybe it’s not only Connect’s fault. [Read More]

As you probably know, SQL Server allows only one default instance per server. The reason is not actually something special to SQL Server, but it has to do with the way TCP/IP endpoints work. In fact, a SQL Server default instance is nothing special compared to a named instance: it has a specific instance id (MSSQLSERVER) and listens on a well-known TCP port (1433), but it has no other intrinsic property or feature that makes it different from any other instance. [Read More]

Today when I checked my mailbox I found an amazing surprise: I joined the ranks of the Most Valuable Professionals for SQL Server! I am honoured to join a community of people that I highly respect and have always been my inspiration. The MVPs I had the pleasure to meet are a model to strive for: exceptional technical experts and great community leaders that devote their own time to spread their knowledge. [Read More]

Does anybody need another good reason to avoid setting AUTO_CLOSE on a database? Looks like I found one. Some days ago, all of a sudden, a database started to throw errors along the lines of “The log for database MyDatabase is not available”. The instance was an old 2008 R2 Express (don’t get me started on why an Express Edition is in production…) with some small databases. The log was definitely there and the database looked online. [Read More]

Some weeks ago I had to wipe my machine and reinstall everything from scratch, SQL Server included. For some reason that I still don’t understand, SQL Server Management Studio installed fine, but I couldn’t install Books Online from the online help repository. Unfortunately, installing from offline is not an option with SQL Server 2014, because the installation media doesn’t include the Language Reference documentation. The issue is well known: Aaron Bertrand blogged about it back in april when SQL Server 2014 came out and he updated his post in august when the documentation was finally completely published. [Read More]

Lately I spent some time evaluating some monitoring tools for SQL Server and one thing that struck me very negatively is how none of them (to date) has been reporting database free space correctly. I was actively evaluating one of those tools when one of my production databases ran out of space without any sort of warning. I was so upset that I decided to code my own monitoring script. [Read More]

I haven’t been blogging much lately, actually I haven’t been blogging at all in the last 4 months. The reason behind is I have been putting all my efforts in a new project I started recently, which absorbed all my attention and spare time. I am proud to announce that my project is now live and available to everyone for download. The project name is ExtendedTSQLCollector and you can find it at http://extendedtsqlcollector. [Read More]

I’m writing this post as a reminder for myself and possibly to help out the poor souls that may suffer the same fate as me. There’s a software out there called “Digital Guardian” which is a data loss protection tool. Your computer may be running this software without you knowing: your system administrators may have installed it in order to prevent users from performing operations that don’t comply to corporate policies and may lead to data loss incidents. [Read More]