This will primarily be an extension into the Wiki section on SQL Server Admin Hacks. OLTP and Reporting Reporting from OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) databases can be nothing short of difficult at times. The process of reporting of these types on databases can cause blocking, long wait times and in some severe cases, complete failure on the part of the high level operational requirements of the database. In the stage in which we consider how reporting will affect our databases and how to react proactively to the constant is during the architectural phases of your database server landscape. In regards to SQL Server, this means the feature set that you weigh in for each edition available to us.

Yesterday 2 QNap TS-419P Turbo NAS arrived at work for me to play with. The question of course is how did I choose a solution that will work for me? To be honest pure luck. To be honest you have too much choice and choosing the right thing isn’t going to happen unless you trust to pure luck or try some things out and that takes time. So I trust to luck. And no it does not help to read reviews or the manufacturer’s website since most sites will not tell you the truth anyway. Neither will I BTW I just tell you what I think is important for me. But that’s something that is normal on all blogs since blogs are just an egotrip anyway.

Microsoft has released Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 today. Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2008 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure. Installation includes the Windows Azure SDK. (For VS 2010 Beta 2 please use the November 2009 release) Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 includes the following

To me it seems that Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition is the stepchild of the Visual Studio family. Even in shops that have MSDN Universal/Ultimate subscriptions this version is just not used that much. Maybe it is that long name of this product, I still prefer DataDude. I would like to show you that if you do have licenses for this tool then you should use it because it has some great features. Today we will focus on static code analysis.

I went to a local MS launch event for Visual Studio today, mainly to see what was new with Team Foundation Server, but what really impressed me was some of the new architecture tools they’ve added. I admittedly haven’t read too much about this before today (my needs have been well-served by NDepend) but I’m happy to see some improved architecture tools find their way into Visual Studio. Looking at the version comparison chart, it appears this is only available in the Ultimate version.

Most DR solutions include log shipping strategies. Log shipping (LS) is an extremely inexpensive solution for DR and also one I recommend. There is little learning curve to individuals just coming into the administration career for setting LS up and maintaining the flow. One thing that will undoubtedly be asked of you at some point in time will be to make a backup of the warm-standby database for other purposes. Reasoning for this is commonly due to the geographical location of the standby database verses the online production environment. Often in order to move a backup that is larger in size, there will be several hours involved in the actual copy of the phsyical files and sometimes even days depending on the variables in place on the WAN.

In order to figure out if you need more memory for a SQL Server you can start by taking a look at Buffer cache hit ratio and Page life expectancy. Buffer cache hit ratio Here is what Books On Line has to say about Buffer cache hit ratio _Buffer cache hit ratio Percentage of pages found in the buffer cache without having to read from disk. The ratio is the total number of cache hits divided by the total number of cache lookups over the last few thousand page accesses. After a long period of time, the ratio moves very little. Because reading from the cache is much less expensive than reading from disk, you want this ratio to be high. Generally, you can increase the buffer cache hit ratio by increasing the amount of memory available to SQL Server.

Ugh. Eli (blog | twitter) could not have picked a worse time to tag me for this. But unless my eyes deceive me, he did just that here. Writing down goals is always a healthy thing to do though, so I will oblige. Who knows, it might help me avoid similar chaos next year at this time. And it will be a nice break from goal #1, that I’m currently caught up in.

I was recently tagged to share my 2010 Goals by Ted (blog | Twitter) in his 2010 goals post. I want to thank him for that, as I believed I had a good long term goal until I went to write down my goals for this year and realized that all I had was a vision without a plan. The initial act of thinking up a career goal is difficult, and after I completed that goal I fell into the trap that so many businesses do: I forgot to communicate and build plans for that vision. A well communicated vision allows everyone in a company to start facing the same general direction, but only provides a direction to wander towards, not a driving force or well-planned route. I believe there is a similarity with career goals, having only a vision means I will consider opportunities that come to me in light of my future goals, while a plan forces me to build or seek opportunities that will help me achieve my goal instead of relying on chance opportunities.

This question popped in the microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming forum yesterday. A person wanted to change a column from varchar 500 to varchar 2000. This is actually pretty easy to do in SQL Server, you can use the alter table alter column command Let’s take a quick look at how this works First create this table CREATE TABLE [TestTable] ( [id] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL , [itemdate] [datetime] NOT NULL , [title] [varchar] (500) NOT NULL , ) ON [PRIMARY] Now insert one row of data