Author Archives: paulwinans

Updating Statistics

Posted on June 6, 2014 by paulwinans

Statistics and sql server. When people ask me what are statistics I answer with a Google maps analogy: while we know the roads are there, the traffic changes and, therefore, in the same way we know it is best to patiently … Continue reading →

Posted in Configuration, DBA, SQL | 2 Comments

SQL Licensing and the Cluster

Posted on March 8, 2014 by paulwinans

We licence our servers by core as we are all Enterprise edition. This choice is determined by the memory requirements of some systems not being met by Standard edition, to be able to mirror (for 2008 R2 and high performance for … Continue reading →

Posted in DBA | 2 Comments

Making use of the model Database

Posted on February 6, 2014 by paulwinans

All the websites and books talk about how the model database is what all future databases are based on, including tempdb, so add important stuff there. In my experience, there is not a great need to have the same function … Continue reading →

Posted in Configuration | Leave a comment

Rehearsals = Good

Posted on January 8, 2014 by paulwinans

I worked construction during high school and college summers and holidays. The people I met were a ton of fun and had great stories. The people who’d been incarcerated, they had the best. My move from construction to computers included … Continue reading →

Posted in DBA | Leave a comment

Execute As

Posted on December 17, 2013 by paulwinans

We all want to have our databases not owned by an individual. Especially the model database. We can run alter authorization on database::<<db name>> to sa after the fact, but why make a problem? An easy way to avoid this … Continue reading →

Posted in Configuration, DBA, SQL | Leave a comment

Searching RDLs

Posted on November 10, 2013 by paulwinans

As the company is moving, we needed to search for hard coded address data in all the reports. This smart individual came up with an easy way to extract all the RDLs from the reportserver database. I was especially impressed … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL, SSRS | Leave a comment

Educating Your Developers

Posted on October 19, 2013 by paulwinans

Great departments have great people. No kidding! How do we end up with quality developers? Time has shown it we can’t hire the best for every position and, inevitably, something will come up which will require growth, whether personal or professional, … Continue reading →

Posted in DBA, Leadership, SQL | Leave a comment

Hard Coded Values

Posted on April 12, 2013 by paulwinans

Often we see code with business logic in the form of hard coded values. For example, a long, comma separated IN statement which lists out a category. These comma delimited lists are of course data duplication, nothing anyone wants. It would be worth … Continue reading →

Posted in DBA, SQL | 2 Comments

Performance Tuning from a High Level

Posted on March 7, 2013 by paulwinans

We had a report which ran “forever”. Seriously it was a long time. After restoring production backups on to a test instance, I ran the same sql. Not good. I could have grown the coconuts whose water I was drinking. … Continue reading →

Posted in DBA, SQL | Leave a comment

Searching for Emails in Tidal Scheduler

Posted on October 28, 2012 by paulwinans

TES stores emails used in email actions in the table dbo.tskmail. If you want to find a particular email, then, you’d use a query like this: select * from dbo.tskmail where tskmail_to_ext like ‘%your_email@somewhere.com%’

Posted in SQL, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler | Leave a comment