Ronald Dameron - IT beats loading bombs

Jack Corbett ( @unclebiguns ) and Andy Warren( @sqlAndy ) invited me to speak at this month’s Orlando PASS meeting. First, I want to thank them for the opportunity. I enjoyed it. For the benefit of those who couldn’t make the trip to Tampa last month for SQL Saturday #32, I did my talk on “Database Hardening via PowerShell”. I worked a half day and then headed to Orlando around 12:30 PM.  The plan was to speak and to visit my daughters at the University of Central Florida. I visited with the youngest daughter prior to the meeting.  When I asked if she was available, she asked “Does this mean I get a free lunch?”.  Yes, we had a late lunch . After lunch, I headed over to  the meeting location around 4 PM hoping to beat the rush hour traffic. Boy, was I wrong.  The constant rain that day slowed I-4 Eastbound traffic to a crawl.  Plus, I was wondering who let all these people off work early??? I arrived at the meeting location at 5 PM, a full hour bef...

SQL Saturday #32 was a great success this past weekend! Pam Shaw ( @pamshaw ) and Jorge Segarra( @SQLChicken ) did a great job organizing this event! Thanks to KForce for hosting the event and to all the sponsors for picking up the costs. If you missed this event, you also missed out on some of the best food ever at a SQL Saturday!  Spaghetti Warehouse in Ybor City did a great job with the speaker/volunteer dinner Friday night.  The day of the event all attendees got a taste of Ybor from “Latam at the Centro” for lunch.  BEST LUNCH I HAVE EVER HAD AT A SQL SATURDAY!  Hmmm. Best lunch I’ve had in a while. It was great to meet the following SQL Tweeps in person: @adam_jorgensen , Argenis Fernandez( @afernandez ), David Taylor(@ dyfhid ), @GarethSwan , Jason Strate( @StrateSQL ), Aaron Nelson( @SQLvariant ),and Jeff Truman( @jtruman0917 ). I hope I didn’t miss anybody. Great to see these tweeps again: @brianknight , @cmille19 , @GratefulDBA , @patrickdba , ...

A manager posed the question “Can we list all the Windows groups that have access to all of our database servers?”  The answer is “Yes.”  It is very easy to do with a short PowerShell script via SMO. The results are written to a CSV file. 1: ## List Windows Groups on a server ## 2: ## ./get-WinGrps.ps1 3: $start = get-date 4: write-host "Start: " $start 5:   6: [reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName( "Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo" ) | out-null 7:   8: $FilePath = "C:\Output" 9: $OutFile = Join-Path -path $FilePath -childPath ( "WindowsGroupsOnServers_" + (get-date).toString( 'yyyyMMdd_hhmmtt' ) + ".csv" ) 10:   11: # Version inventory 12: @( foreach ($svr in get-content "C:\Input\TestServers.txt" ) 13: { 14: 15: $s = New-Object "Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Serve...

Over the past week, I have traded e-mails with Ola Hallengren in Sweden regarding his highly regarded SQL Server maintenance scripts.  I made a suggestion that he include a parameter for the Litespeed @compressionlevel parameter. Today, he updated his scripts to add this parameter!  His announcement to me follows. Hi Ronald, I have now released a version with this feature. EXECUTE dbo.DatabaseBackup @Databases = 'AdventureWorks', @Directory = 'C:\Backup', @BackupType = 'FULL', @BackupSoftware = 'LITESPEED', @Compress = 'Y', @CompressionLevel = 7, @Verify = 'Y' http://ola.hallengren.com/Versions.html Please try it out. Best regards Ola My intention is to use Ola’s scripts as the core of our updated maintenance routines.  Our current routines were written back in 2002 and aren’t using the latest syntax. Many thanks to Ola Hallengren for implementing my suggestion so quickly!

I didn’t attend the 2009 SQL PASS Summit in Seattle  but I am following a bunch of people on Twitter who did. There tweeting and twitpics were the next best thing.  The Twitter feed was like a stock ticker that kept me current on what was happening at SQL PASS. What did I learn via Twitter regarding SQL PASS? I should get the conference DVDs. The webcast "Simplify SQL Server Management with DMVs - the Experts' Perspective"  was hilarious.  I attended.  Buck Woody’s reign of humor continued throughout the week. Louis Davidson (@drsql) loves sys.dm_io_virtual_stats. I learned a simple query to find all the DMVs on a server from Buck Woody. I can hover over the columns in Activity Monitor and see what DMV they are from. Tom LaRock said "You don’t just get me, you get my network."  A great way to justify SQL PASS attendance to a manager. The Quest Twitter T-shirts were great.  Never ever walk out of a Buck Woody pr...

Last week was a very good week for me from a SQL Server training perspective. Kevin Kline of Quest Software spoke on Tuesday 10/13 at the Tampa SQL User Group on "Disk I/O Tuning for SQL Server". 40-50 people turned out. Kevin commented appreciatively on the attendance. Friday 10/16, I attended Buck Woody's pre-SQL Saturday seminar on a performance tuning methodology he calls "Application Path Analysis". An educational and entertaining seminar.  Buck Woody's presentation style seemed to compress the time space continuum.  The day flew by because he was he was so interesting. Finally, SQL Saturday!  Andy Warren, Jack Corbett and many volunteers pulled off another very successful SQL Saturday.  I don't think there is a better value for SQL Server training. We had Microsoft MVPs, regional, and local speakers.  I attended five sessions and spoke at one session. The session I attended were: Kendal Van Dyke's "Performance Tuning With...

I have to keep track of our SQL Server version inventory.  The goal is to reduce the SQL Server 2000 population as fast as possible. The following PowerShell script will produce a csv file containing the database server name and the version of SQL Server it's running. 1: ## Get SQL Version installed on multiple servers ## 2: ## ./sqlver.ps1 3: $start = get-date 4: write-host "Start: " $start 5:   6: [reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo") | out-null 7:   8: $FilePath = "C:\Output" 9: $OutFile = Join-Path -path $FilePath -childPath ("SQLVersions_" + (get-date).toString('yyyyMMdd_hhmmtt') + ".log") 10:   11: # Version inventory 12: @(foreach ($svr in get-content "C:\Input\AllLOBServers.txt") 13: { 14: $s = New-Object "Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server" $svr 15: $s | select Name, Version 16:   17: }) | export-csv -noType $OutFile 18:   1...