Mathom Solutions Blog-IT

Step by step process to align your disks (Windows 2003 and earlier).

Late Nite TV does, it so why don't DBA's do it. Well they do. The folks over at PASS have come up with a great list of Top 10 for subjects such as Clustering, Profiler, Execution Plans, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integration Services, Security,...you get the picture. It is thorough and will be expanding soon! Check it out and learn a little.

A way to possibly track who dropped a table in SQL 2008 and older when all you have is the log file. Not perfect but at least you can get a time and if you are using Windows authentication, you should be able to track back to the Windows SID with some accuracy.

How to setup mirroring between two databases that have two different domains under SQL Server 2005 with mixed mode authentication using SQL Server logins with the added security of using certificates. Very nice step by step.

How to implement a step in an SSIS package that retrieves the list of files that are available on an FTP server before processing them. The SSIS FTP task doesn't have an operation that will retrieve the list of files so this article provide an example of how to do it and some other future steps.

Small performance boost on large systems with large delete patterns...removing the ghost cleanup process. Only use in special cases. On big systems it's possible for the ghost cleanup process to fall behind the rest of the system, with no hope of it catching up.

Using the SSRS Execution Log and SSRS Reports to create a datamart with historical information and reports on usage.

As part of my talk at the 2009 US PASS Summit here in Seattle called Inside SQL Server Wait Types, I’m creating this blog post as a reference point that can be used to find out information about wait types in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. My hope is that if you have a question about a wait type you encounter with SQL Server 2005, 2008, or beyond, you will use this blog post as the starting point. This blog post should also be used as an enhancement to what you can find on SQL Server Books Online

The whole point of describing all these columns was just to provide a lead-in to my little holiday gift to you. Here is a table that can be created in the master database, and then populated with the output of DBCC LOGINFO. The name of the table starts with sp_, which means you can use it from any database. Once you have captured all the rows from DBCC LOGINFO, you can query them using any TSQL queries.

To summarize, failover clustering with SSRS is possible, though there are a number of considerations and manual steps involved on your part. SSRS is designed to achieve High Availability through a Scale-Out architecture. As our documentation and best practices point out, that is your best option for achieving High Availability with Reporting Services.

SQL Azure Database is a cloud database service from Microsoft. SQL Azure provides web-facing database functionality as a utility service. Cloud-based database solutions such as SQL Azure can provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead. This paper provides an architectural overview of SQL Azure Database, and describes how you can use SQL Azure to augment your existing on-premises data infrastructure or as your complete database solution

Good step by step to getting started by Microsoft's SQL Azure platform.

Brad defines what a code of conduct is, explains how it can be useful to DBAs and the organizations they work for, and consider if and how it could be enforced. Finally, he offers his take on a “Code of Conduct” for the Exceptional DBA. Rather than be prescriptive, the goal is simply to offer advice to DBAs on how they might conduct themselves within the bounds of the professional responsibilities of their job.

Buck Woody's awesome links to better prepare for the 70-432 SQL 2008 Implementation and Maintenance

While other solutions exist to solve this problem, the best solution involves using a certificate signed assembly to call sp_send_dbmail. This solution prevents the need to take additional steps to add users to msdb and the DatabaseMailUserRole, and it removes the risks associated with having TRUSTWORTHY ON.

With SQL Server 2008, new Windows collations (denoted by *_100 in the collation name) were added that are in full alignment with the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems. Some of these new collations are not supported with earlier versions of the native data provider during connection to a SQL Server 2008 database, if both the client and the server environment are not in Unicode.

When a query is cancelled that is currently executing in SQLCLR an System.Threading.ThreadAbortException exception is raised. It seems harmless enough to add a catch or finally block to your code to cleanup necessary resources. What I found is that it is not just as easy as catching the ThreadAbort. In some scenarios the ThreadAbort can be upgraded to a rude abort and the catch/finally block(s) are not executed.

In this white paper we discuss two of the new features in SQL Server 2008, Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. We test the performance of SQL Server 2008 on a set of complex data warehouse queries designed to highlight the effect of these two features and observed a significant performance gain over SQL Server 2005 (without these two features). On average, about 75 percent of the query execution time has been reduced. We also include data that shows a reduction in the number of rows processed and improved balance in parallel queries, both of which highlight the important role the Star Join and Few Outer-Row features played.