This weekend was SQL Saturday #33 in Charlotte NC and also the first one I attended. It's been a long weekend, but I wanted to get my thoughts down while they're still fresh. Be warned, it's been a long weekend, so my grammar and attempts to reign in my propensity for verbosity have both gone out the window.

Background

Sorry SQL Saturday? Tarwn and SQL? We have questions and we know how painful it is for you to write short blog posts...

SQL What?

SQL Saturday is...

How to calculate the Nth week day of a month?

This will be useful in most of the Scheduling problems like Scheduling Jobs, Appointments etc.

Let me demonstrate how we can achieve this:

Let us take an example of say, 3rd Sunday in February, 2010 will come on 21st February, 2010.

The solution to the above problem needs to satisfy 3 conditions.

1. The date should be in the specified month and year.

2. The date should be in the specified week number.

3. The date should be of the specified week day.

Solving this problem comprises the followi...

Do you benefit from compressed backups if your data is compressed already? This was a question that was asked recently; I thought that the question was interesting and decided to do some testing.

Here is what we will do; we will create two databases with only one table. In one database we will use page level compression and in the other database we won't use compression. After that we will backup each database twice, once with backup compression and once without backup compression. After that, we will do restore from these backups. After doing all these, we will find out if data com...

Over the weekend on twitter, the topic of high availability over a Wide Area Network (WAN) came up. The limit of 140 characters doesn’t do this topic justice, so a follow up is a good idea.....

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...