When I was concatenating some fields to create an address, I ended up with a number of spaces in my address that were unnecessary. For example, I had this: However, when an address didn’t have a direction, I ended up with a double-space in the middle of my address, and I wanted a way to …
Category Archive: SQL Server
SQL Server and T-SQL Development
Feb 08
Migrate database indexes to a new file group
I recently had to mass-migrate all the indexes from a database to a new file group since we’d added some additional storage to our database server. I found this article at SQL Server Central(unfortunately, registration required, so I’ve included a copy of the original script in the download at the end). While it worked okay, there …
Jan 28
Finding unused tables in SQL Server 2005 and 2008
Recently, I was tasked with “cleaning up” a very large database on our network – it included hundreds of tables with cryptic names, and I wasn’t able to tell which ones were still being used and which weren’t. There are triggers for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE, but no trigger for SELECT, and that’s what I …
Sep 28
Moving a SQL Server database to another server on a schedule – without using replication
Recently, I had the need to copy a set of databases from a dozen remote servers to a central server, restore them, and have it happen automatically, with no intervention from me at all. Replication wouldn’t work for the following reasons: Many tables didn’t have primary keys, so merge replication was out (even though this …
May 06
Accessing a clustered SQL Server instance without the instance name
When I clustered SQL Server 2005 the first time, it bothered me that I had to access each clustered instance using both the cluster DNS name and the instance name. If my SQL Cluster is called SQL-CLUSTER and the DNS alias of my first instance is SQL-INSTANCE1, I had to connect to SQL-INSTANCE1\INSTANCE1. Since each …
May 01
Scheduled Task “Could not start” when installing SQL Server on a Windows Cluster
I ran into this error while deploying SQL Server 2005 Enterprise to a two-node Windows Server 2003 cluster. The SQL Server installation checked all the prereqs with no problems, and as soon as it was time to actually do the installation, it paused for about 5 minutes, with the message “SQL Server Setup is preparing …
Mar 18
Accessing System.DirectoryServices from SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005 allows for the integration of .NET assemblies into the databases so that they can be accessed from inside stored procedures and other database functions. Although this is a great new feature, I got hung up on a particularly cryptic error message when I tried to build an assembly and import it. Since …
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