SQL Server Diaries

I don’t think I’d be wrong in stating that almost all transactional and analytical systems store or make use of date, time, or parts of to achieve the respective functional targets.  A task I had to complete once was to find a way to retrieve data based on the period... [Read More]

You have been requested to provide an SQL Server environment to host the database/s of Application123. Once you’ve identified the server onto which the instance will be installed there are a number of checks I would suggest, or at least these are the ones I follow. You will observe that... [Read More]

The System Center Operations Manager 2012 is Microsoft’s flagship product to monitor various aspects of the infrastructure.  Specific details about the product can be found in the TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205987.aspx.  Monitoring can be “extended” to SQL Server instances (2005 and later versions only) using the System Center Monitoring pack for... [Read More]

Before explaining what the errors were I will first explain the environment configuration. [Read More]

The more I learn about SQL Server the more I realise how little I know.  While delving in the output of some DMVs I noticed that the sys.dm_exec_requests can be used to find the percentage completed for a backup operation, as well as the estimated time of completion. [Read More]