One of the things that is fairly important when writing articles, blogs, whitepapers or even authoring books is ensuring you do not share any personal information in your screen captures. This is even more important when you are using company property to make your screen captures. Now, on some occasions, leaving connections to SQL Server or Security context is ok. For example, I’ve used Fred and God commonly as SQL Authenticated Logins to my instances. Those two accounts are something I picked and kept to over the years. This can be done with named instances also. You can install and name a SQL Server something comical, meaningful or encrypted. “Connect to your instance named, SomeCrasyMessedUpMachineHolySmokesSQLIsCool”.

This post will contain the way I would answer the questions that were posted in, "SSIS Test yourself with these interview questions". I will post a few answers a day. Hope they help someone out there have a good understanding of the questions and why they may be a great thing to ask in an interview or testing situation. What is an Error-Tolerant Index? This question in an interview process may stump you up until the point you hear, Fuzzy Lookup. Think of an Error-Tolerant Index in respect to full text search keywords and indexing. In FTS, keywords can be exposed by using things like the fts_index_keywords DMF. (I believe that is the correct DMF. If not, it is close) In the FTS keyword list, several keywords are indexed and the location retained. That is the basics of the architecture of the index itself at a very skyscraper view.

Last week we created a pair of smoke tests with the Selenium IDE tool. Several people commented, with varying levels of politeness, about the downsides of Selenium IDE. There are even those that will tell you not to use it at all, to immediately bypass Selenium IDE and go straight to code. My opinion is that this is a matter of context. Today we are going to get into the nuts and bolts of coding automated tests against the WebDriver library. Before we get into that, however, let’s discuss when it is appropriate to make this transition.

The answers to these questions can be found @ SSIS Interview Questions – Answers A while ago I had written some questions for an SSIS discussion. I happen to tweet that I was doing this and received some requests to post some of those questions. This was mostly out of curiosity of what I thought made really good SSIS questions. All but one or two of these questions I feel are more advanced questions that relate to SSIS and I have hopes they will indeed, test you. Then again, what I think is advanced may be extremely simple to others. In saying that, the shortened list of questions I thought were interesting for others to try answer (with or without BOL which you can open directly by clicking the diagram above [and can fully answer any of these. It is how I learned them]). It is up to you if you want to test yourself or not. I’m sure everyone will enjoy trying them out so post your answers in the comments. Don’t be shy; this is how we learn from each other. My own answers may be worded as such that they are completely off too. I hope everyone that visits LTD would let me know so I don’t make the mistake twice.

SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Tools alike can become unusable when other installations, multiple installations or even strange operating system level problems occur that remove critical supporting assemblies. When these assemblies either become corrupted or missing, the fix it rather simple in most cases with a simple copy/paste of the assembly in error from the shared directories that were installed initially. Note: This is step 1 in attempting to fix this type of management tools error. Step 2 and a stable solution is to run a repair on the management tools as well as updating and installing to the latest service pack or related cumulative update. Never, and I mean never, perform this on a production SQL Server during normal operating hours. SSMS and other management tools are typically not required to successfully run the SQL Server Engine. This means the data will still be available to end users. Plan you time carefully and always, and I mean always, have a recovery strategy. Backup databases, Operating System level files, SQL Server directories and all security on the servers. Always assume the worst can happen and the recovery will always be less painful.

Introduction So this is going to be a long blogpost. I got this code from [Katrien De Graeve][1] last Friday. She got a mail from someone in the community where something would compile in VS2008 but not in VS2010. In essence I could reproduce the behavior and I contacted [Lucian Wischik][2] (Spec Lead for Visual Basic) because I found the problem intriguing. I did not find a connect item on this problem.

This week I had training in a building on campus where I have never been before. The interesting part besides the training was that there was a mini museum in this building. There were a bunch of old and very old pieces of technology stored here. I had to laugh when I picked up a mobile phone from the early 80s, this thing weighed several pounds. Make sure to take a look at that 10 pound hard drive with all those 12 inch platter….or what about that PDP/11?…..good times….I don’t even know what half of these things are.

I’m in love. With a PowerShell script I wrote. We have multiple SQL Server Agent jobs that run on a daily or weekly basis. These jobs write logs to a folder on the server. Example: D:mssqlserverbackup When a job fails, we receive a ticket for it. The ticket does not include the reason for the failure. The existing procedure to find the error and resolve it was to RDP to the server, navigate to the directory, and read the text file.

Does this kind of diagram get you excited about what’s next to come in designing and maintaining a system that involves online and offline data consuming users? If it does, read on… One of the cool things about SQL Saturday events, they don’t necessarily need to be on a Saturday. The annual Minnesota SQL Saturday is a perfect example. They hold theirs on a Friday. From my understanding, this is to be more adaptive to the schedules of the community there. Although it may sound odd to have a SQL Saturday on a Friday, I can easily see why a company would see value and grab their attention more when a training event like SQL Saturday is during a normal business day. If you need proof in this method of organization, the Minnesota SQL Saturday last year was a great success. This year, registration is already to the capacity of the venue and the waiting list has been initiated.

How long does it take to browse through a website after each build and make sure none of the pages have mysteriously blown up? 5 Minutes? 20? No time at all? The time we invest in manual testing adds up. As we switch focus to newer parts of a site we may even stop testing the ones we ‘finished’, confident that they’re stable and won’t be affected by our newer changes (yeah right). And despite the time spent manually testing, we still eventually deploy issues that a 30s check in the right part of the application would have detected.