My dear friends Erin Stellato (Blog | Twitter) and Michelle Ufford (Blog | Twitter) tagged me for Meme Monday series…so here we go Actual start of blog HEAP, One index. Select Column with predicate other column. RID Lookup. End of blog

One of the most important tasks a DBA should know how to perform, and should test regularly, is a database restore. It is absolutely necessary to back up your data so you have it if a disaster strikes, but it is equally important that you know how to retrieve that data when needed. The basic RESTORE syntax looks like: RESTORE DATABASE [Name] FROM [Device] WITH [Options]... That restores an entire database to the last full backup. You can restore specific files, filegroups, and pages. You can also restore transaction log backups, if you have those for the database.

 For the past two Saturday’s I have been lucky enough to not only participate in but also present at a SQL Saturday. It has been an honor to be selected as a presenter when there have been so many great speakers to choose from. If you haven’t been to a SQL Saturday before, or it’s been awhile since your last one, I encourage you to check out the SQL Saturday website and find one near you to attend. They are a great way to learn about SQL Server at a very low cost. Not only do you get a wide range of sessions to choose from, you also get a chance to meet a ton of people who work with the same software you do.

Good old fashion error handling……….This is something that is often skipped over when we code because we don’t stop and take the time out to plan it out. I’ve put together a presentation on this topic and I’ll be submitting it to the next SQL Saturday that I attend, but would like to share the main points here. Obviously, there is a lot I left out here, don’t want to spoil the presentation!

In November 2010, before the annual PASS Summit, Brent Ozar held the first Free-Con, in Seattle WA. He invited a pretty impressive list of SQL community speakers and bloggers to talk about, well, speaking and blogging, and careers. You can read his wrap-up of it here: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/11/my-latest-experiment-sqlpass-freecon/. Grant Fritchey, Kendra Little, Jeremiah Peschka, Tom LaRock, Karen Lopez, and more were there. I remember quickly reading the post and thinking, “OK, Brent got a bunch of Those People in a room to talk about cool stuff. Must be nice.” Then I went back to working.

Well this is my first blog posting and I have plenty to blog about. Last week was amazing! It all started on…. Tuesday: My day started at Microsoft in St. Louis. I got there nerdy early, as usual. Microsoft is located on the 11th floor so I rode the elevator up and the doors opened up and there stood two guys and a bunch of bagels! It was Jose and Austin from PragmaticWorks. They were waiting for Brian Knight to open up the doors to the office so they could setup for the day. Today was the first day of an SSAS Workshop and I was eager to get started. People started filing in right away. It was good to hook up with lots of folks from our SQL Server User Group in St. Louis, Julie Bloomquist, Pete Williams, John Dempsey, Rosa Johnson and Phil Milner. And then a semi-familiar face came through the door, it was Bill Fellows from KC! This was shaping up to be quite a social event as well as a technical one. Brian Knight started right on que at 8:30am. He has incredible energy, like you can tell when he is in the house! Class started out fast and furious and Brian took us from 0 to 60 in no time at all. Before we knew it we were brousing our first cube. By the end of the day everyone’s head was spinning with thoughts of what they could implement back at the ranch.

To follow this article, download [Refresh Development.zip][1] and add it to a new or exisitng SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Project in BIDS. This past weekend I presented a new session titled SSIS: The DBA Multipler. The session covered taking the power of SSIS and extending the SQL Server Agent with it in order to multiply and automate DBA tasks. The session went very well and I received a lot of great feedback. Thank you again to all that attended.

LessThanDot (LTD) is coming of age and making a great name for itself with all the communities. This past week the primary administrators and operators of the site once again paid, from their own pockets, the server costs to keep us going. We also moved the site to a better server during this process. OK, we may not be running on Watson but I have a feeling it will help a bit when chrissie1 says he is leaving VB.NET or when gmmastros releases a version of the awesome SQLCop application.

If memory serves us right we have had the current server for 4 years now. And it’s time to switch to a new one which is cheaper and better. Our local sysadmin, damber, will be doing this over the next week, so there will be a little down time and we will be changing IP-address so there might be a little lag there too. If you have to miss your favorite site for a little while this week, don’t worry, we will be back. damber is very competent and I’m sure it will be done with the least down time possible. When exactly damber will be doing this is not yet known. It depends on godaddy for one and damber’s time.

My very first SQL Saturday was #31, Chicago 2010. I showed up, I volunteered, I learned a hundred things I got to use, and I met some great people – some of my best friends, now. So when I heard there would be a Chicago 2011, I was stoked. Sign me up! Better yet, let me speak! And how about I offer to help with anything the organizers need? So, on Friday, March 25, I set out on a road trip. Destination: SQL Saturday #67, Chicago. I had my usual road trip essentials of coffee and granola bars, along with boxes of t-shirts for the event, and two laptop bags. I spent the day in downtown Chicago, at Brent Ozar’s Freecon, which deserves a blog post of its own (and will get it). Then I headed west, to DeVery University in Addison, to help set up and go to the speaker dinner.