SQL SERVER – Identifying Database Default Locations for Data and Logs

How often have you had the opportunity to go back to basics and learn the same thing again in a different manner? How many of you are developers here? I am sure each one of us write a piece of code that gets onto the production – how often have you been revisiting the same code say after a week post release. Have you ever tried to look at the code to enhance it or do the same thing differently? I am sure the majority of you never even want to look at the old code you wrote. This is second to human nature and trust me, you are not alone in this planet with this attitude. Let us learn about Database Default Locations.

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MySQL – Different Methods to Know Current User

There are different methods to know the name of the current user in MySQL. There can be many reasons we want to know who is the current user. Here is list of the of the few of the such reasons.

Customized code which we want to run based on the reason.
Checking the permissions based on the user.
Inserting the name of the user in the audit table.
Displaying special message based on the login user.
Executing some special logic/code based on the logged in user.

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SQL SERVER – FIX: Could not connect because the maximum number of 1 user connections has already been reached

Sometimes making a change in something for which the impact is not known, could cause a heavy loss. A similar situation happened when one of my clients called me and told that he is in big trouble and losing a lot of money every minute. Without wasting any moment, I asked what is the issue, then he told that he changed some setting in SQL Server, restarted SQL and now no one is able to connect. The application is completely down! Let us see how we can fix the error: Could not connect because the maximum number of ‘1’ user connections has already been reached.

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SQL SERVER – Finding If Status of Bulk Logging Enabled or Not From Logs

Backup related questions are always challenging and sometimes our basics is shaken when someone randomly asks us something we were not aware of. Sometimes it takes a little bit of digging around in documentation and we are in for a surprise because this has been there for quite some time. In a recent conversation with a DBA friend of mine in a consulting exercise, he came back to me with an interesting question. Let us see in this blog post about how to find the status of Bulk Logging Enabled or not from SQL logs.

Pinal, how do I know if a Bulk Logging operation was performed on my SQL Server. I know there are a number of SSIS jobs that run during the day and night and I have a number of log backups that are taken continuously. Some of these jobs actually change the recovery model to Bulk-Logged and end of the process, they turn it back to Full once the script was to end. I know I can do a number of audit settings to make sure this is captured. But is there any other way to identify which of these logs when taken have the Bulk logged operation?

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SQL SERVER – How to Query Active Directory Data Using ADSI / LDAP Linked Server

There are situations when you need to integrate SQL Server with other product. Once of the classic example was seen during my last visit to a client. They wanted list of email addresses and phone numbers for all users in the company to be fetched by Active Directory. I have told them that SQL can read that data via linked server. Here are the steps to learn how to query active directory data.

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