Introduction While I’ve been a regular attendee at SQL Bits (going back to the original conference in 2007), this year I did something different. This was my first time volunteering – becoming a SQLBits Helper. I’m lucky to already know some people who are experienced SQLBits Helpers. They helped me out by answering some…
T-SQL Tuesday is the blog party started by Adam Machanic (b|t) over a decade ago and is now maintained by Steve Jones (b|t) on tsqltuesday.com. Each month, lots of people blog their thoughts on a common topic. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is from Gethyn Ellis (b|t) who is asking us to share the “best piece…
I went to SQLBits 2022 last week, returning with feelings of joy, inspiration, a cold and a swollen ankle! Here follows a long rambling essay about my experiences, peppered with a collection of random photos from random people. I learned loads at SQLBits, from a technical perspective, I picked up a lot of knowledge but…
Sometimes, queries just go bad. They can take you on a Journey. Not always a Journey that you want to go on, but so long as you’re learning then “The Journey is the reward”. I’ve seen a lot of queries recently that use the EXCEPT operator. Frequently used in Data Warehouses to process Slowly Changing…
How many times do you ask someone to do something and get the response “I’m not doing that – there’s no point”. Turns out SQL Server does that sometimes too – as I was reminded recently. After spending time examining query plans using SentryOne Plan Explorer, I was faced with the following improbable Plan…
An issue was reported with one of my SQL Servers that required it to be rebooted. After the reboot, I logged on to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to check the SQL ErrorLog to ensure that all was well. Unfortunately, I was met with an error when I tried to open the ErrorLog: “Failed to…
Patching a large SQL Server estate can be a big job. Where possible, tools such as Ivanti HEAT can be used to deliver and install patches, but this doesn’t always work. Some patching needs to be done manually – e.g. where applications or users need to be managed or when dealing with High Availability situations…
Recently, I had a situation where a lot of data needed to be deleted. This was caused by a Monitoring system which was incorrectly configured. When Monitoring, you should Monitor just the information that you need, but no more. In this case, far too much information was being monitored and recorded, causing the Database that…
I was troubleshooting an issue in Dev with SQL Server Reporting Services. As part of the work, I decided to patch the environment to see if that might help. Patches often resolve issues, and give you a few new issues too – let’s call it “the bug exchange”. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a…
I recently encountered some strange behaviour with SQLAgent Jobs in an Always On Availability Group. There’s a major difference between SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and SQL Server Availability Groups that makes it a little bit more complicated with SQLAgent Jobs. Put simply, with a Failover Cluster, there is only one “SQL Server” involved.…
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