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

I will just start of by saying that Beginning Spatial With SQL Server 2008 written by Alastair Aitchison is a truly awesome book. Although I have tinkered a little with the new geospatial capabilities in the SQL Server 2008 Proximity Search With The Geography Data Type blog post I did not really understand or know that ...