Like many DBAs I spend a lot of time maintaining my SQL Server backups. From SQL Server I maintain both full backups and transaction log backups. I have often restored my full backups but until recently I have never restored a transaction log backup. All backup strategy’s are only as good as the last time you tested...

I spend a lot of my time creating new features that simplify my companies business processes. A good example of this is an invoicing system I created. Instead of users working off different spreadsheets and copying and pasting data between various different programs the user can click a couple of buttons and...

I use SQL Server Management Studio all the time for writing queries, getting data and general SQL development. I have enjoyed seeing the improvements that each new version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) introduced. One great improvement was intellisense. This feature saves typing and reduces errors by...

I recently read a blog post by Pinal Dave about how you can backup straight to Azure Storage. The procedure he described is only available for SQL Server 2014 or later. I won’t go into detail of this method as Pinal describes it better than I can, but the basic of it requires setting up credentials and then running a...

For the past few months I have been deploying changes to my companies database every couple of weeks or so. Over a weekend when the database was not being used I would make a backup of the database, load up visual studio, deploy the database changes and copy a couple of front-end files. My weekends and evenings have...

Recently me and my development team have been looking at performance and how to improve it. One area of improvement we have identified is with our stored procedures, which we plan to rewrite. But how do we identify which are the easiest to rewrite and which are the hardest? My first thought was maybe to count the...

For historical reasons I use Microsoft Access as the front-end for all my line of business databases. Access allows you to create an ADP file that can connect to your SQL Server database. However Office has dropped support for this, so the last version of office that I can use is Office 2010. Before I start hating on...

I recently saw this blog post by Brent Ozar that I thought I might discuss. Brent listed 13 questions to ask about a database before you start working with it. I am going to go through these 13 questions and expand on them based on my experiences. Is this database in production now? I think it should go without saying...

Today is my day off, but I wake up and have a quick look at nagios to see if there is anything I need to worry about. Yes there is, SQL Server has run out of disk space on its data disk. I race downstairs and VPN onto the server to find out what has happened. One of my monitoring databases has had runaway log growth...

Today I encountered a new error. Run-time error ‘6’: Overflow doesn’t really tell me much. The error was occurring in the Access ADP front-end of our main database. It was only occurring for one particular Id number which was really confusing me. First thing I tried was to remove the most recent changes I had made,...