By Bonnie Allard on
1/13/2012 7:17 AM
Max Trinidad did an fantastic job presenting Extend you TSQL skills with PowerShell
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By Bonnie Allard on
12/13/2011 7:32 AM
My sincere thanks to Red Gate, a premier supporter of our SQL community and their many Microsoft users. They offered a holiday competition for ideas to create the best holiday party and our input won providing the Space Coast SQL Users Group an excellent holiday party evening. We were able to provide dinner, gifts, and a free round of drinks for our members and their spouses and significant others. The party was hosted in the back room of the Broken Barrel, an excellent sports bar/family restaurant in Palm Bay, Florida. The food was delicious and consisted of Asian potato salad, sweet potato fries, smoked wings and assorted smoked meat sliders. Broken Barrel’s service was excellent; they even helped with suggestions on food types and combinations. The best part was the gifts weren’t technical books or left over swag like the previous years. I will never forget giving a member s wife a book on Administering Windows Server 2008. Thankfully everyone in our group loves humor. This year I found a little store in Jensen beach that had a ton of unique gifts. We gave tickets to spouses and significant others and had each person choose a wrapped gift from the table. I picked out several Florida Santa figurines, threw in a mounted prehistoric shark’s tooth, nice chocolates and a bottle of fine wine. Then everyone received a ticket for our door prize, a decorated Santa on the beach. The event was an outstanding success, we cannot thank Red Gate enough for their kindness. Everyone have a wonderful holiday and a safe New Year, I know I will.
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By Bonnie Allard on
10/21/2011 8:46 AM
Thank you Florida Institute of Technology and Dr. Philip Bernhard for sponsoring our group for a new meeting place!
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By Bonnie Allard on
10/15/2011 11:46 AM
This was my third year attending PASS, I had the privilege of being apart of my friends first time experience at PASS Summit. It was with great pleasure I was able to introduce my friend to all the people that have helped shape my career over the past 3 years. Everyone was friendly and all the presentations she attended were spot on! Thank you all! There is a lot of knowledge with in our community and these events really facilitate and encourage collaboration amongst the technical people. Networking and Professional Development has given an increased focus at PASS and I really believe this is critical for career growth. Are you a Linchpin was a great session. I find it very encouraging when those you admire for their technical expertise sit on a panel to and share personal experiences that have help shape their career . This humanizes the technical industry.
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By Seth Phelabaum on
9/28/2011 9:23 PM
A couple weeks ago a user complained that on one of our development databases, one of the views he was linking to via Access was missing some of the columns. There were no permissions issues and the columns all showed up properly if they looked at the view via SSMS; but when they went into Access and linked to the view… the columns weren’t there. After scratching our heads for a bit, we realized that the user didn’t have access to the User defined Types that the columns in the underlying table were designated as. SQL doesn’t actually care about this, you can view data in the table or view whether you have the references permission or not… but Access is a bit more picky and will ignore the column if the user doesn’t have the proper permissions. Normally we grant references on these types to Public in all the databases so that we don’t have this issue, but on this particular development server we forgot. This is another issue that can be very puzzling when it happens out of the blue and is very hard to Google...
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By Seth Phelabaum on
9/21/2011 10:55 PM
Because this was a problem that Google was zero help on and I did find a couple other people afflicted with it, I figured I’d write a post about it.
The issue was this. I add a table to replication (SQL Server 2005). The option to replicate DDL changes is set to true, vertical_partition on the article is set to false. From everything you’ll read about replication (in 2005+, 2000 didn’t work this way, you needed to use the column add/delete procs), it should now just work. Sure, you’ll find some posts floating around out there about people with random problems that resembled this and the fixes usually just involve turning on the option to replicate schema changes or some other such basic fix. Not the case here. I tried everything I could think of. Rebuilt the publications from scratch. Dropped replication all together on the server and added it back (to be fair this might have temporarily worked, but I don’t feel like dropping it and re-creating it all again to verify).
The issue turned...
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By Seth Phelabaum on
9/14/2011 9:41 PM
This is a technique I’m sure many people are already using in their environments. Instead of using the actual name of your SQL Server as the name of the linked server that you call, use a generic name. For instance. If you have a couple of servers named SQLSales02 and SQLMarketing01 that you want to set up linked servers for, consider using more generic names such as SalesServer and MarketingServer.
The main benefit we garner from this in our environment is that when we move back and forth between our Test/Development/Production environments, we don’t have to worry about changing the names of linked servers in the code. We just point the linked server on development to the development sales server and the linked server on production points to the production linked server. No code changes. Another benefit this confers is that if you ever need to upgrade or replace SQLSales02 (and the name of the server changes) you don’t have to hunt down all the code pointed to it, you just change the linked server...
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By Seth Phelabaum on
4/17/2011 10:26 AM
Here are a couple more SSMS tricks I’ve stumbled upon recently. Both involve the functionality of registered servers. If you really only deal with 1 or 2 servers in your environment, these probably won’t help you out much. But for those of us who have to deal with a large number of servers, this can be a real time saver. First, for anyone unfamiliar with Registered servers, you get to the option by going to the view menu and can then add individual servers as ‘registered’ servers which you can easily get back to, complete with login information. You can then add these individual server registrations to ‘groups’. (The move options are under tasks when you right click on a server.)
 ...
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By Seth Phelabaum on
4/2/2011 10:27 AM
This is one that I figured most everyone would know, but repeatedly over the past couple weeks in my office, I was surprised to find that many people had never seen this before. If you just click on objects in the object explorer, you can’t hold shift to select multiple objects. This leads people to believe that you can only script one object at a time. This is not the case, you just can’t do it from there. You have to go to Object Explorer Details instead.
It is located in the view menu:
This will open like a new query window in your main SSMS area and is linked to the object explorer panel (similar to windows explorer). From here, you...
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By Seth Phelabaum on
2/13/2011 11:11 AM
Most of us like things that make our lives easier. When they’re free, it’s just that much sweeter. I would have sworn I’d done a post or two on SSMS Tools Pack before, but apparently this one has slipped through the cracks. No Longer!
SSMS Tools Pack is a free add-in for SSMS created by Mladen Prajdić. This tool provides a whole slew of useful features that are missing from SSMS, but today I will focus on the one that has saved me several hours of time in the past week alone: The ability to Script Grid results.
Often when testing out bug fixes on development I won’t have the exact rows that are causing a problem on the prod server, or just won’t have good test data for a variety of reasons. With SSMS TP I can run a quick query on prod and script out the rows I’d like to move over, right click in the results grid and just like that I’ve got my rows all ready to copy over and insert directly...
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