SQL Saturday #144 – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Posted by on August 21, 2012 1 comment

SQL Saturday #144 is over but what a great time it was!  Sacramento’s first SQL Saturday boasted close to 200 attendees and showcased great speakers like Steve Jones (@way0utwest) and Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen).  We were represented with local talent Mitch …

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My first SQL Server presentation – database mirroring w/ Transparent Data Encryption

Posted by on April 12, 2012 No comments

I’ve finally cut my teeth on a technical, public presentation on SQL Server. This wasn’t explaining to a bunch of co-workers and managers about the latest features in SQL Server 2012.  It wasn’t sharing my understanding of whatever piece of …

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SQLSaturday #144 coming to Sacramento CA on July 28, 2012

Posted by on March 16, 2012 No comments

The Sacramento SQL Server users group is happy to announce that we’ll be organizing our own SQL Saturday event to be held in Sacramento on July 28, 2012. Check out http://sqlsaturday.com/144/eventhome.aspx for more details!

Another “Wait on the Database Engine Recovery handle failed” – SQL Server 2000 to 2008R2 upgrade

Posted by on January 30, 2012 No comments

I was given the task of upgrading our SQL Server 2000 instance to SQL Server 2008R2. I ran through the following steps to make sure the upgrade would be a success: Took a snapshot of the VM Upgraded to SQL …

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“In transit” encryption to SQL Server

Posted by on December 13, 2011 No comments

To encrypt connections to the SQL Server engine, there are a few options: IPsec, that encrypts the whole network packet SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) using “Force Encryption”, which only encrypts the packets sent to the database IPsec + SSL “In …

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Simple restore using T-SQL

Posted by on December 8, 2011 No comments

Restoring your database is simple using T-SQL. I begin by using ‘RESTORE FILELISTONLY’ to get information about the files contained in the backup set. It returns a result set with information like ‘LogicalName’, ‘PhysicalName’, ‘FileGroupName’ and ‘Size’ (in 8K pages), …

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PASS Summit 2011 first timer, three days of awesomeness

Posted by on October 15, 2011 No comments

My first time attending the Professional Association of SQL Server Summit was amazing! Three days of great people, useful information and free stuff! I had to check an extra bag at the airport to bring home my loot. I arrived …

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SQL Server upgrade to 2008R2 and “Wait on the Database Engine Recovery handle failed”

Posted by on September 15, 2011 No comments

Recently, I was tasked with doing an in place upgrade of SQL Server from 2005 to 2008R2.  My environment was virtualized so I had the luxury of snapshot’ing the server before I performed the upgrade.  This was fortunate, as it …

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Getting information from Oracle into SQL Server using SSIS

Posted by on May 4, 2011 No comments

I needed to populate a SQL Server database with information from an Oracle database, but found when I created a linked server and ran the INSERT statement manually, I was getting errors regarding truncation and datatypes.  I had already run …

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Create a linked server to an Oracle database (and not lock up the instance)

Posted by on April 26, 2011 3 comments

I’ve created numerous linked servers to Oracle from SQL Server and what should be a straightforward process using SSMS has caused me some headaches.  For whatever reason, when using the GUI, I’ve actually locked up the entire SQL Server instance …

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