Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter) posed the question System Documentation: What’s your method?. In my experience documentation has either been nonexistent, out of date or even worse, plain wrong. These situations often get blamed on lack of time dedicated to documentation tasks. Therefore I’ve always aimed at making documentation easy or even fun. I’ve blogged [...]

In a previous post I demonstrated how a little bit of VBA code can be used  to build some basic user interfaces to deliver data. Continuing on with this the examples here will show how to build some basic user interfaces; Combo box (or drop down list) and a Multi-Select List. Like the previous examples [...]

I’ve been thinking about how Powershell can be used by the DBA as an extra tool in their armoury. An article that caught my eye was The Daily DBA Checklist, specifically an item about Triggers; "…last week some idiot turned a host of triggers off in our ERP system, causing a cascade of posting problems [...]

I do a fair bit of work with Linked Servers and cross-database queries  and sometimes come across the following error when joining between databases with different collations; Msg 468, Level 16, State 9, Line 1 Cannot resolve the collation conflict between ‘Latin1_General_CI_AS’ and ‘SQL_Latin1_General_Pref_CP850_CI_AS’; in the equal to operation. To replicate this error run the [...]

Being able to know the setup and configuration of your SQL Servers is important for many IT Professionals. Powershell, combined with SMO, makes this task easy. SMO exposes a lot of properties allowing you to easily retrieve things like Processor & RAM Information, Service Pack Level, Operating System information, Collation Settings, number of Databases, and [...]

Those boring network auditing tasks you have to do are now going to be a breeze with Powershell. With technologies like WMI accessible from Powershell there is virtually no limit to what you can do. I’m going to publish a series of articles showing how Powershell can be used to document your server and network. [...]

Sometimes it’s necessary to rename tables and databases and this can create a lot of work if it’s referenced by other database objects. I recently came across this situation at work. Developers had introduced a second database into the system and each referenced the other. This didn’t sit well with our testing environment that had [...]

Are you part of the DBA crowd that hasn’t yet checked out Powershell? I’m really enthusiastic about its potential for server administration. Script out all those mundane jobs you have to do and make life easy. Here’s a Powershell script that makes checking if services are running, and optionally starting them, on multiple servers really [...]

Over the years I’ve experienced various problems with temporary and custom database objects (as in objects created specifically for certain client systems). Development and deployment teams are often distinct and this can create issues. These issues have included; Temporary objects persisting for months or years beyond their initial purpose. Temporary objects spreading from development to [...]