Steve Jones

Getting Organized This article continues the same topic of Automatically Gathering Server Information. If you want to read the previous articles, click on one of these links: Getting a Count of Database Users – Part 1 Automatically Gather Database Size – Part 2 Automatically Gathering Log Space – Part 3 Introduction Now that I have […]

Automatically Getting Log Space This article continues the same topic of Automatically Gathering Server Information. If you want to read the previous articles, click on one of these links: Getting a Count of Database Users – Part 1 Automaticall Gather Database Size – Part 2 Introduction Up to Part 3 already! I never quite thought […]

Automatically Gathering Database Size This article continues the same topic of Automatically Gathering Server Information. If you want to read the previous articles, click on one of these links: Getting a Count of Database Users – Part 1 Introduction: I was recently asked by a collegue how to gather certain information about a SQL Server […]

Update I did not get much feedback from this article, but one person wrote me and expressed a much different point of view than I had regarding abbreviations. I decided to update the article to clarify a few things as well as include an alternative viewpoint from another DBA. Introduction Acronyms and shorthand are as […]

Someone Actually Thought This Through Introduction I wrote a rant on the “sa” password a couple weeks ago and got quite a bit of feedback. One of the items was a response from Great Plains Software, which was mentioned in the article as having poorly designed their software to use the “sa” account. What follows […]

Introduction There is a great deal of information about your SQL Server that may be of interest to you or your clients. I was recently asked how to gather some statistical information for a SQL Server and its environment by a client. The person asking the question was wondering whether to use Performance Monitor, stored […]

Introduction One of the keys to SQL Server performance is ensuring that you have the proper indexes on a table so that any queries written against this table can run efficiently. There are more articles written about designing indexes, choosing columns, etc for optimizing performance, so I will refrain from repeating most of what is […]

Introduction I love my children. They bring some of the greatest joy into my life as I watch them learn, develop new skills, and break the rules my wife and I set for them. Yes, breaking rules (one of kids favorite pasttimes) is often frustrating and annoying at the time, but funny later. Much to […]

Every stable environment remains that way because of change management that minimizes disruption and provides a means to undo the changes. Every single production SQL Server you manage should have a log associated with it for changes you may make to data, configuration, etc. If you do not have one, stop reading this article and […]

Tame Those Strings! I guess I could have called it “String Manipulation”, but that was nowhere near as exciting as the other title. Often I find developers performing string manipulation in stored procedures and queries and chastise them for it. Using T-SQL is, IMHO, in general, a poor use of resources. Often the middle-tier or […]

How Much Data Can Fit On a Page? I had an issue recently that was caused by a misunderstanding of SQL Server database design. While it was not a critical issue or one which would cause a user to notice, it was still an issue that affected the corporate website and required time from the […]

Or more appropriately titled “How to get someone else to do your job”. If you are anything like me, you hate changing passwords for SQL Server users. One of the most annoying questions I get starts with “I forgot my password. Can you reset it for me?” (you need a good nasaly voice to get […]