So tell me if this is a fantasy or a reality about restore backups: You are on a beach, sipping on your cocktail and looking at the sea when you get a frantic call from your boss, “One of the junior DBAs has just deleted all of the data from a critical database”. You say “Hold on”, switch to a browser on your smartphone, go to your dashboard on SqlBak.com and click a Restore button on your latest transaction log backup. In a few seconds, you get back to your boss and say: “I have fixed it”. Your boss is stunned, thinking you are a magician and makes a note to give you a raise and a bonus while you continue enjoying the beach…
SQL SERVER – COLUMNSTORE and COLUMNSTORE_ARCHIVE data compression
In earlier blogs on “Fundamentals of Columnstore Index”, I took a simple approach on taking a tour of how to create a simple Columnstore index. Having said that, SQL Server 2014 supports columnstore and columnstore archival compression for columnstore tables and indexes. Columnstore tables and indexes are always stored with…
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Interview Question of the Week #008 – Write Scripts to Convert String to Title Case or Proper Case
Just received a question in an email asking questions about how to Convert String:
“I just got out of the interview and I was asked to write scripts to convert a string to Title Case. I was also asked to refer to the website over here to validate my answer after I complete writing script.
Do you think it is not fair to ask such questions in an interview?”
SQL SERVER – Script to Find Strings with Same Characters
One of my blog followers asked me if it is possible to check whether all the characters of a column value is same. For example if there are values like KKK and KKT, the value KKK should be the output as all characters are same. There is a method without…
Read MoreSQL SERVER – FIX – Error: 905, Severity: 21, State: 1 – Database ‘xxx’ cannot be started in this edition of SQL Server because it contains a partition function ‘xxx’.
Recently one of my blog reader contacted me via mail and told that after upgrading from Enterprise Evaluation Edition to Standard Edition, the database was not accessible. To troubleshoot, I have asked them to share SQL Server ERRORLOG. There are various ways to read Errorlog. Here is the method to…
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SQL SERVER – Finding Top Offenders in SQL Server 2012 – Notes from the Field #068
[Note from Pinal]: This is a 68th episode of Notes from the Fields series. Performance tuning gets easier with SQL Server 2012. For the first time, you can capture a workload and find your top offenders inside of Management Studio without having to write a single line of T-SQL or…
Read MoreSQL SERVER – Notes and Observations on ReadOnly Databases in SQL Server
In the past couple of weeks, I have written few blogs that revolve around utilizing “readonly” databases. It was fun working on this special case scenario that I had stumbled upon an interesting set of questions from my blog readers. These were not clearly called out in my previous blogs,…
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SQL SERVER – Cloud Based Data Integration Made Easy – A Real World Scenario
If you are a DBA, once in a while, you will have a situation where you end up with some tasks which will be boring and annoying. Trust me in my life, I often come across similar scenarios quite often. Here is one such tasks I came across a few days ago. Let us learn about cloud based data integration.
SQL SERVER – Quiz with DATEADD Function – SQL Puzzle
How many of us use some sort of date or datetime function when working with SQL Server? I cannot think of a single developer who would ever say they don’t work with datetime conversions in their application. Almost every application needs some manipulation of datetime datatypes. There are a number of pitfalls that can get into which we might not be aware. Here is a simple blog: Quiz with DATEADD Function that I would love to hear your views on what the output would be:
SQL SERVER – Installation Error – INSTALLSHAREDDIR parameter is not valid because this directory is compressed or is in a compressed directory
One of my blog reader contacted me for assistance. Here is his email: Hello Pinal, I am trying to install SQL Server on my laptop but getting below errors: SqlServer.Configuration.Sco.DirectoryAttributesMissmatch: Folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server has an unsupported attribute (Compressed) set. Please resolve this issue by removing the unsupported attribute…
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