Earlier today, I created an Amazon RDS SQL Server instance, you can check out that post here: Trying out Amazon Relational Database Service I decided to take a closer look, the first thing I wanted to know is if I could see the error log. The first thing I did was check if I could see the logs from SSMS, I expanded the error log folder and was greeted with this message
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Since it is a day off for me today, I decided to give Amazon Relational Database Service a try. Amazon RDS has SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL as databases available. You can try it out for free if you are a new AWS customer Amazon RDS for SQL Server – Free Tier New AWS customers can get started with Amazon RDS for SQL Server for free and receive the following Amazon RDS for SQL Server resources each month for free:
If you’ve read my past blogs, you’ll know that I believe SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is absolutely a must for assisting in execution plan review, tuning and troubleshooting. Recently, SQL Sentry went to the next level with the services offered in Plan Explorer. The next step was to provide an easily accessible feature to one of the best execution plan and optimizer minds I know in Paul White, but a community view for guidance in assisting with execution plan questions. The feature is built into Plan Explorer and allows you to upload an execution plan directly to SQLPerformance.com. This site offers Q & A, accompanied by a description of the plan and comments, and questions or inquiry of how the exact plan or operations are working.
You might have noticed a slight glitch in the Matrix yesterday. That’s because LessThanDot is now no longer hosted on a dedicated server over at godaddy.com but we moved to host4geeks You might be interested to know that we have moved up in the world. Our old server was a dual core intel processor with 2GB RAM and 2x300GB disks with linux on it. To our new server being a similar dual core intel celeron processor with 8GB RAM and 2x250GB disks. We needed the RAM more than anything.
With SQL Server 2012, the power of Availability Groups is arguably one of the best high availability, disaster recovery, reporting, and impact-offloading features to be released. Administrators can now offload reporting to read-only mirrors, offload backup tasks to secondary replicas, and geo-cluster and send their replicas out with asynchronous capabilities for disaster and recovery. One extremely useful method for upgrading SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 is to utilize mirroring. This lends itself to as little downtime as possible when the switch to the SQL Server 2012 database is actually performed.
In yesterday’s post Unique index difference between Oracle and SQL Server , I showed you that SQL Server only allows one NULL value in an unique index while Oracle allows multiple NULL values. Today we are going to look how we can allow multiple NULL values as well in a SQL Server unique index. I am going to show you two techniques. The first technique is known as a nullbuster, this was first demonstrated I believe by former SQl Server MVP Steve Kass. Basically you use a computed column to allow for multiple NULLs. Here is an example
Some time ago Data Explorer, an add-in for Excel 2010 or 2013, was released in Public Preview. In short, it is a self-service ETL tool which is in my opinion a great tool for quickly searching data sets. Recently, I had to create a demo for showcasing PowerPivot and Power View in Office 2013. As with all demo’s, the hardest part is to figure out which compelling story you will tell. I had downloaded a publicly available Excel file with Olympic data from 1900 until 2008.
Red Gate recently released a new version of their great product, SQL Backup Pro. The one thing about this version that may get your fancy on is the buzz around cloud storage. For most administrators, both DBA and Domain alike, the cloud has offered a great deal in terms of disaster and recovery by throwing just about anything out there that you need offsite and is critical to ensuring a safe recovery point. With this new version of Backup Pro, I can see the tool becoming even more widely used for it’s already ease of feel to getting your backups in SQL Server done and safeguarded. I have been around long enough to have used LTO tape for olouffsite storage and have felt the pain of getting those tapes back in the event of a data disaster. No one likes that situation. No one! Cloud type storage has thrown the tape days to the curbs (although, still have merit in tape) but with tools now integrating and services backups to a cloud based service, our options are greatly improved.
MongoDB 2.4 has been released. MongoDB 2.4 is the latest stable release, following the September 2012 release of MongoDB 2.2. The MongoDB 2.4 release contains key new features along with performance improvements and bug fixes. Here are the highlights Hash-based Sharding: MongoDB 2.4 adds Hash-based Sharding, built on top of our range based sharding. Using a hashed shard key allows users to get a good distribution of load and data in a simple manner, in cases where documents are accessed randomly through the key space, or if the access patterns may not be totally predictable.
When working with different database systems you have to be aware that some things work differently from one system to another. I already blogged a couple of times about differences between SQl Server and Oracle, those post are the following Truncate rollback differences between SQL Server and Oracle Differences between Oracle and SQL Server when working with NULL and blank values An Oracle NULL/Blank gotcha when coming from SQL Server.