Mathom Solutions Blog-IT

As you know, I am a big fan of Free...here are some other goodies:

Engineering Software for Accessibility by Microsoft Press. In an effort to enable software developers to create accessible Windows applications, we wanted to share our process with the community. We have captured this engineering process in a new book, Engineering Software for Accessibility. The book addresses three basic questions:

1. How do you plan for accessibility?
2. How do you design your software for accessibility?
3. How can you implement and test to your software to confirm it meets the accessible design?

You will learn that properly implemented accessibility enables access to Windows applications for users with a variety of capabilities.  

Get it before it is gone!

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SQL Server Tacklebox by Rodney Landrum. Essential tools and scripts for the day-to-day DBA that helps with Scripts, tools and techniques to tackle SQL Server issues, Troubleshoot performance issues, Receive notifications of impending issues, Fight off data corruption, Document and report on your servers, Automate and standardize SQL Server installation, Migrate data and manage data growth, and Secure access to your servers.    

This is sponsored by Red-Gate Software.   

• High Availability and Disaster Recovery at ServiceU: A SQL Server 2008 Technical Case Study
  Microsoft White Paper -- ServiceU Corporation is a leading provider of event management software. An essential part of our IT mission is maintaining high availability and disaster recovery capability. This technical case study shows how we use Windows failover clustering and SQL Server 2008 database mirroring to eliminate single points of failure in our data centers and enable fast recovery from a possible disaster at our primary data center. These strategies and solutions will be of interest to database administrators, senior IT managers, project leads, and architects.
  (tags: sqlserver sql2008 Whitepaper)
• Mit creme : Reviewing Agile Process Management Tools, Part 2
  More on the Agile web based products.
  (tags: agile)
• Mit creme : Reviewing Agile Process Management Tools
  Good review of some agile web based tools.
  (tags: Agile)
• Finding out how many times a table is being used in an adhoc or procedure calls...| SQLDenis
  Uses DMV to find out how many times a table is being used...not perfect but a fairly good one.
  (tags: sqlserver sql2005 sql2008)

• SQL Server Replication Scripts to Pull Replication Configuration Information | MSSQLTips
  Scripts to find out what tables are being replicated, what databases are published, what servers are subscribers are involved in replication.
  (tags: sqlserver Replication t-sql)

• SQLClue | Bill Wunder
  SQLClue is a series of DBA tools by Bill Wunder to help you: 1. monitor SQL Server metadata change in mixed SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 environments 2. share, search, and improved the knowledge and information of the data center as a data team 3. define and meet the business continuity needs of the data center 4. provide Database Developers with as needed access to the bits and behaviors of live systemns without direct live system access to accelerated the development environment.
  (tags: SQL runbook configuration)
• The Data Loading Performance Guide | Microsoft
  This white paper describes load strategies for achieving high-speed data modifications of Microsoft SQL Server database
  (tags: sqlserver bulkload performance Microsoft)

I ran across a couple of good links for free e-books about Microsoft SQL Server and figured I should share them.  

Introducing SQL Server 2008 by Peter Debetta, Greg Low, and Mark Whitehorn.  You can learn about the new features SQL Server 2008 including Security and Administration, Performance, Type System, Programability, Storage, High Availability, and Business Intelligence.  

Brad's Sure Guide to SQL Server 2008 by Brad McGehee.   This is about SQL Server 2008 and also includes two of his other books:  How to become an exceptional DBA and DBA Best Practices.  

Mastering SQL Server Profiler by Brad McGehee.  As its name implies, learning all about SQL Server Profiler (2005) and how it can help you make your systems faster.  

Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans by Grant Fritchey.  Hey, this is an awesome book that talks about how you can read the excution plans and make your system go faster....hey who wouldn't want that?

Hopefully you will find these helpful.   

Also, if you know of any others, please let me know.

Some one asked the other day about source control for SQL Server.  I groaned as I knew what was coming next.  Don't get me wrong, I believe in source code control as it has saved my rear-end many times.  However, none of the tools do exactly what I want and nothing is seamlessly integrated within SQL Server.  Anyhow, here is a list that I have from my research (in no particular order).

SQLVSS is integration solution for SQL Version Control, it scripts database objects into Visual Source Safe, keeps records of different versions of database throughout the development process without storing a copy of the entire database each time. it simplified troubleshooting process by knowing exactly what has changed, and has the ability to roll back changes to prior version of the objects.

DB Ghost tools, in conjunction with any source control system, provide a true change management solution for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 code. It guarantees a full audit trail and complete database integrity by building and promoting databases directly from a source control system whilst preserving data in the target databases.

Embarcadero Change Manager offers database administrators and developers a powerful set of tools to simplify and automate the database change management lifecycle.

SQL Compare is the industry-standard tool for comparing and synchronizing SQL Server database schemas. 

Change Director for SQL Server provides a powerful automated solution for managing and tracking schema changes to SQL Server databases.

Randolph is a new and unique solution that revolutionizes the way version control and change management is done for SQL Server. It shifts the responsibility for versioning from the users to the software.

SQL Source Control 2003 enables source control of code and documentation of your databases. Full source control and documentation versioning support is possible through integration with Visal Source Safe.

SQLSourceSafe Integrates with both SQL Server and Visual SourceSafe, providing an effective and effortless SQL code version control management system for individuals and project teams to manage SQL Server database objects. It also provides a development platform for developers to work on and execute their SQL objects and scripts.

Good luck and I hope you find something that meets your needs. Oh and if you have any others to add, just us the contact page above and let me know!

I am always on the lookout for new tools and when they are free...you can't really complain!

Here are some new ones that are rather interesting so make sure and check them out!

SQL Server 2005 Express Profiler  is a free profiler for the Express Edition of SQL Server.

SQL Scripter is a data export and scripting utility for MS SQL Server.

SSMS Tool Pak  is an Add-In that gives the Management Studio some neat features such as CRUD generation and a whole host of neat little featuers that MS left out.

Sentrigo Hedgehog Standard is a free host-based software solution for real-time database monitoring, auditing and breach prevention.

Red-Gate Log Shipping Monitor is a free tool for collating and summarising SQL Server Log Shipping activity.

I also have a list of several others over at my main website so stop over there and see the full list. 

I have been doing a lot of data migration and disaster recovery synchronization lately and had a need to run DOS commands quite frequently.  It was a pain to switch from SSMS to the command window or prompt and then run the DOS command or even more interesting the batch files I just exported.  So I found a way to run it from within SSMS.  

Type in your command and make sure to prefix it with two exclamation points !!  Then click the SQLCMD button on the tool bar and then hit Execute (F5) and voila, it runs! 

Ok, this isn't directly related to SQL Server but it did help me with moving some data around. 

Recently I inherited yet another SQL Server (2000 with no Service Paks...ouch!) and of course my first call of the day is a user saying that they heard that I took over the server and it is experiencing performance problems.  You just have to love your job some days. 

Upon doing some basic investigation, I saw the C partition was at a roomy 100MB on a good day.  Ok, we all know that isn't enough.  The D partition had about 400GB and both were on the same RAID 5 volume.  Ok, pretty simple, I will just use my Acronis Disk Director Server to resize the partitions and we are back in business. 

Ok, I am neurotic but not crazy so I wanted to make a backup. This server contained one database on the D partition that was 123GB in size.  My first thought was to stop SQL server and copy to a network share but that would take a fair chunk of time and I didn't want to take that long.  I also know that a SQL Backup would take just as long. 

My next thought was to contact the network team and have them do a Symantec's Veritas Backup Exec backup of this database but again that was going to take about 8-10 hours and we wouldn't have enough space to install the local SQL agent.   Still too much down time. 

My next thought was to install Red-Gate's SQL Backup as we use that on our other servers and get a pretty decent compression out of it for our daily backups, but unfortunately, we didn't have enough free space on the c partition.

My next thought was to detach the database and Zip it to something more manageable.  I have been an ardent user of WinZip since the very early years (DOS...remember that?) but after doing some test that was still going to take about 7-8 hours.  Better but still too long as I wanted to get to other things today. 

A few days ago, my network team raved about a new program called 7-Zip and they said it was free and really really awesome...his words not mine.  So I gave them a call and had the install in a few minutes. This baby was small (818K) so it was going to be able to install in the small space we had. 

After playing around with the application a bit, I started my compression and I choose the fastest speed to see how long it would take.  According to my estimated it would take about 4 hours to compress my 123GB database. 

I started it up and let it run.  It was crunching away and was quite impressive although the interface could use some work.  It took my 123GB database and in 3.75 hours it had a compressed file of 9.4GB.  Yes, that is not a typo.  I was floored myself.  Now I could easily copy the compressed file to the network and get on with the repartitioning.