MSSQLTips

Two Things To Tell You

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ March 3, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I have three things to tell you today.
First, I have a new article over at MSSQLTips.com, this one on configuring a SQL Server 2008 Audit. Head over there and check it out, I give the details you need in order to get your instance configured for auditing.
Second, and somewhat related, I have submitted a session [...]

New Tip Posted

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ February 9, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I had another tip posted over at MSSQLTips today, you can find it at http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1938
The tip helps you configure a policy inside of PBM that will help you to determine how badly your transaction logs are fragmented.

New Tip at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ January 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Linked server configurations are often overlooked when it comes to environmental baselines. I don’t know of too many people who go out of their way to track such details. And I have often been surprised by vendor software packages that claim to track system changes but do not include linked server information.
One thing about linked [...]

New Tip Over at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ October 18, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Ever have a customer request that you take a backup of a database, a restore using that backup, and then tell you that it is the wrong data?
Every now and then it happens, so I decided to put together some t-sql to display details on what was done. The script essentially details when the restored was [...]

Policy Based Management Tip at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ August 13, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I had another tip go live over at MSSQLTips today, this one involves the use of Policy Based Management to verify that your backup files are still available on disk. I had recently published a similar tip that was just a script that used the undocumented stored procedure xp_fileexist to achieve the same goal. I [...]

Another tip at MSSQLTips

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ July 24, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

I had a tip published over at MSSQLTips yesterday and wanted to drop a quick post to brag tell people about it. The tip is very straightforward, it uses xp_fileexist to verify if your database dumps are still on disk or not.
Keep in mind that xp_fileexist is one of those undocumented stored procedures, which is [...]

Want a Free Trip to PASS?

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ July 22, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

I have previously noted on this blog that I write for MSSQLTips. As such, I wanted to tell you about a prize that MSSQLTips and Idera are sponsoring: an all expenses paid trip to the PASS Community Summit in November 2009.
Here are the details – http://www.mssqltips.com/pass_giveaway_entry.asp
That’s correct, you can win a trip to PASS! Go and [...]

MSSQLTips – Backup History Tip

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 9, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

A few weeks back I was asked how long a backup took for a specific database. I knew the info was in the msdb somewhere so I pieced together a bit of code and then thought to myself “hey, this might be a good thing to share with others at MSSQLTips”. Well, OK, I actually [...]

Now Writing for MSSQLTips.com

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ April 7, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Every now and then I see requests come to our team that say “hey, buddy, when was the last time that database was restored?” My first thought has been, historically, “how the hell am I supposed to know that?” After all, the management tools given to us (EM, SSMS) never list a “last restore date” [...]