All Articles - SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

SQL SERVER – What is Hypothetical Indexes?

November 12, 2014

If you ever thought this is some sort of trick to bring you to the blog, well you are wrong. This infact is something worth a look and interesting thing to know. Before I start to explain you the finer details, let me tell you that this is NOT a…

SQL SERVER – FIX – Error: One or more files do not match the primary file of the database

November 11, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Error Messages

Writing about SQL Server for close to 8 years, almost every single day means I get a lot of questions from people on a daily basis. Though I try to answer as many as possible (via email, blog, twitter and Facebook), I get many interesting questions. There are a variety…

SQL SERVER – Take the Quiz for a chance to win a Quadcopter Drone

November 10, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Puzzle, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

It has been a long time since we ran quiz. So let us get ready for a quiz. The quiz has two parts. You have to get both the parts correct to win Quadcopter with Camera (we will call it drone). We will be giving away a total of 2…

SQL SERVER – FIX: ERROR : Msg 3136, Level 16, State 1 – This differential backup cannot be restored because the database has not been restored to the correct earlier state

November 10, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Backup and Restore

During my recent visit to customer site for a session on backups, they asked me to find the cause of the error while restoring a differential backup. Though this seemed to be completely an admin related topic and I had gone for some other session, I took the challenge head-on.…

SQL SERVER – FIX: ERROR : Msg 3023, Level 16, State 2 – Backup, file manipulation operations (such as ALTER DATABASE ADD FILE) and encryption changes on a database must be serialized

November 9, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Error Messages

Errors are the best way to learn how SQL Server works and as DBA’s we are bound to see many of them from time to time. One of the primary functions of a DBA would include creating backups and most importantly trying to automate the same using jobs and maintenance…

SQL SERVER – Fix – Error 5058, Level 16, State 1 – Option cannot be set in database

November 8, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Error Messages

Of late I have been writing about errors quite a bit because I seem to have been digging these from my email archives based on interaction with multiple DBA’s over the past 6-7 years. These are interesting conversations that have become blog posts for your reference. I feel these error…

SQL SERVER – Performance Counter Missing: How to Get Them Back?

November 7, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Performance, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

Of the thousands of mails I receive every day about SQL Server problems, I was recently pinged by a friend who reported a weird problem. He started with a simple question. He said that he wants to monitor SQL Server Performance counters for complete day to send a report back…

SQL SERVER – Msg 1206, Level 18, State 118 – The Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) has cancelled the distributed transaction

November 6, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Error Messages

The saga of working with error messages continues. Here is an error that was shared at one of the User group meetings by a member. While working via linked server to do data manipulation they reported this error on their servers: Msg 1206, Level 18, State 118, Line 9 The…

SQL SERVER – Table Space Allocation Details using DMV

November 5, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL DMV

Understanding SQL Server from inside-out is always something I have loved to learn from time to time. Recently, I was asking my good friend Balmukund on how are pages allocated inside SQL Server and what are the various ways to find the same. He was quick to bounce and say…

SQL SERVER – Using Bitwise And (&) Instead of a Junction Table – Notes from the Field #053

November 5, 2014

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

Notes from the Field, SQL Server Security

[Note from Pinal]: This is a 53rdth episode of Notes from the Field series. Everyday I get 100s of emails and most of the emails have a similar request. Everyone wants to get maximum performance, but they want to make the least amount of changes in their code. Well, though…