SQL Server has 3 different types of built-in backups: Full, Differential and Log. When working out how you’re going to backup your database, you need to understand what the 3 different types are intended for, so you can work out what you need to do. Full A full backup is the simplest type to understand […]
I’m going to start a new series on backing up SQL Server. This was inspired by @Kendra_Little in one of her Dear SQL DBA podcasts In this series I want to work through why we need backups, how to do backups, and the different types of backups that you could do and why you would […]
Andy Leonard (@AndyLeonard) has asked this month on T-SQL Tuesday “Why do you do what you do?” I have two answers to this question. On one hand I do what I do because it pays the bills. I have a full time job working for a company here in Australia and it pays the bills […]
I often need to update a record with an aggregate of another table. It’s often a parent record that has a record of the sum of a column in all of it’s child records. It seems like a really simple case of having an update statement and setting the value of the column to the […]
If you’ve every tried to import data into SQL from another source, or even if you’ve just tried to insert data from a user, odds are you’ve hit ths annoying string or binary data would be truncated error message. I hit it at my first full time job, trying to insert data into SQL […]
Knowing the difference between join types is a very important part of querying a database. The two main joins that I use each day are INNER and LEFT. INNER join means get me everything from table A that has a matching row in table B. LEFT means get me everything from table A and if […]
I have been using Linksys routers for years, since my first router, a WRT54G purchased off eBay. So when my most recent router started to die, it was time to look for a replacement and I naturally went to look at the new Linksys routers again.
As part of my job, I maintain a c# WPF app that we run on developers desktops. This app does things in the background for a while and if you have the app open then you get some feedback on where it is up to. But if you don’t have it open in front of […]
I recently patched some servers from SQL 2014 SP2 CU3 all the way up to CU10. The patching went fine, everything came back online and looked to be working perfectly. However, the next day I realised that the CDC Collection Job was not running. After much googling and trying to rebuild the collection job, I […]
Kendra Little over at SQL Workbooks recently answered the question “When should I use explicit transactions for single statements?” I’m not going to re-hash what Kendra wrote, go and read it on her site. What I want to do is add another case for when I use explicit transactions for a single statement. Firstly, what is an […]
