On Saturday July 23rd, the WVPASS and Greater Wheeling Chapter of AITP joined forces to host the 2nd Annual SQL Saturday in Wheeling, WV. SQLSaturday is a one-day free training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server brought to you by the local SQL Server community and PASS (Professional [...]

I’ve been conducting quite a few SQL Server health assessments lately so I thought I would write a brief explanation of the importance of “Instant File Initialization” and how I check to see if it’s being used. SQL Server File Initialization The SQL Server storage engine utilizes an initialization process on data and log files. [...]

SQL Server supports numerous commands, most of which are extremely well documented with detailed examples provided in “Books on Line.” However, there are quite a few that were left out of the official documentation and remain unsupported by Microsoft. You’ll find references regarding these in blogs across the Internet and some are more useful than [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve been hearing a lot about Master Data Management lately.  Master Data Management is not an entirely new theory; it goes back to the Master File idea from the days of the mainframe.  The basic concept is to have a single ‘correct’ set of data that the entire company will use. [...]

The very thought of database corruption makes my skin crawl. Unfortunately, it’s something that all Database Administrators will eventually experience and need to correct. I’m not going to discuss how to recover from this lurking problem. Instead, I’m going to give you some simple strategies to ensure you are aware of the issue as soon [...]

This post is for those of you who need a quick answer to this issue and you’ve already restarted the DTC service and the SQL Server service in that order. Before you start pulling your hair out and running to DTCPing or DTCTest, if it’s ok with all parties involved, try restarting the DTC service [...]

Recently I ran into an issue with the infamous “Cannot generate SSPI context.”  I have run into this issue a few times in the past and it is a problem that usually takes a while to find the solution and fix.  This problem does not deal with just SQL Server.  Usually the help of a [...]

In this quick presentation I’ll demonstrate how you can use a SSIS package in SQL Server 2008 to loop through multiple files of a certain type in order to load data into your database. Thanks, James Shropshire MCDBA, MCITP SQL Server

Transactional replication can sometimes be a tricky high availability option to work with.  Many companies are now using it more and more to offload reporting to a different server.  But as we know, making schema changes to the tables in a publication is something that must be done when the application changes or different business [...]

For any SQL Server DBA who has been in the game longer than the advent of SQL Server 2005, there was one standard place to turn when you wanted to tune your database.  You would turn to the profiler!  If you had some experience with this, and had been burned by getting too small of [...]