Can I help you?

There are several levels of support for SQL Server. Putting these levels on paper and knowing which to choose for your own particular problem can be a task in itself at times. I hope the following definitions of four levels of support will help you in deciding where to turn to obtain the quickest solutions.

Defining levels

1. Books and BOL
2. User groups /Posting ques...

Chaos or order?

Managing objects in large and small installations of SQL Server can be a job in itself at times. In particular, for the DBA, objects we create on the instances we manage more often than not are found littered over the user and system databases. These objects more often are found in the master database in SQL Server. Really, why not put them there? We are the “masters” over the database server right? SSMS has this quality to it that when we connect to it, we get the master database glaring us in the face by default just like a booby. So o...

I got tagged by Denny Cherry (blog | twitter) who himself got tagged by Brent Ozar (blog | twitter), they want to know how I got started with SQL Server.

So here is my story. My first database was not SQL Server but DB2 running on a mainframe; this was about 10 years ago and back then you did not have fancy keyword highlighting becau...

Someone was writing some queries that brought back a lot of data (and I mean a LOT!!) and after a while he got the following message

Connectivity error: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Could not allocate new page for database 'TEMPDB'. There are no more pages available in filegroup DEFAULT. Space can be created by dropping objects, adding additional files, or or allowing file growth

That is not good, fortunately this wasn't one of our production machines but a dev/test box.

So what causes this? You might think that tempdb is o...

Recently I had to do some data manipulation against a Sybase linked server running on a Unix box. When you have a linked server you can use OPENQUERY do perform DML statements like delete, update and inserts but the syntax is a little different

So let's look at some code, first create a linked server on your machine that is linked to your machine. You can add a linked server through the wizard or through the sp_addlinkedserver stored proc