Back from Vacation!

January 16, 2009 by Michelle Ufford · 2 Comments
Filed under: Miscellaneous 

I’m back from Europe! We had a fantastic time, and saw some incredible sights, but I must say I am glad to be back home. :)

A couple of quick items to mention. First, we now have an official PASS Chapter for the Cedar Rapids area, called I380 Corridor PASS! A special thanks to the folks at PASS for all of their help. If you’re in the Eastern Iowa region and interested in attending or volunteering, please e-mail me at michelle @ sqlfool dot com.

Also, I’ve received a couple of comments about my latest codebox plugin. It appears that in an attempt to fix one issue, I’ve caused another. I plan to work on a solution this weekend, but in the mean-time, if you try to copy code from the codeboxes, you’ll need to do a find/replace on the single quotation marks. I apologize for the hassle and hope to have this resolved soon.

Finally, the very knowledgeable and prolific Mr. Denny wrote a post regarding Wordle and challenged me to post the results of my blog. I’m just now getting caught up from vacation, so I’m a little late in responding, but here it is:

Wordle.com

Wordle.com

Pretty neat, huh? Thanks, Mr. Denny, for sharing! And to keep the fun going, I’m tagging Brent Ozar and Jonathan Kehayias (The Rambling DBA).

Update:
The codebox plugin issue should now be resolved. Please let me know if you have any issues with it.

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SQLFool on Vacation

December 28, 2008 by Michelle Ufford · 1 Comment
Filed under: Miscellaneous 

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ll be on vacation until Jan 14th. I’m not taking my laptop and I’m packing away my iPhone, so I won’t be posting any blogs until I return. :)

Happy Holidays!

Michelle

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SQL Quiz – DBA Mistakes

November 7, 2008 by Michelle Ufford · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Miscellaneous 

Yesterday, Jason Massie called me out to answer the SQL Quiz begun by Chris Shaw.  The goal is to share a mistake you’ve made and what you’ve learned from it; hopefully, others will learn vicariously through you and avoid the same mistakes.

I didn’t have to think too hard about this one. I’ve made some small mistakes in my time as DBA, but only one really big one.  You may have noticed my fondness for partitioning. My first partitioning project was to transition some very large existing tables to a new partitioning scheme. The plan was to stage the new partitioned schema and the newly partitioned data in the staging database, then perform a database rename.  To make things easier on myself, the script I was using in DEV and TEST first dropped the tables and then rebuilt them. (I’m sure by now you know where this is going…)

One morning, while still in the midst of development, I sat down at my desk, opened up the script, and pressed F5.  My first clue that I was in the wrong environment was the errors about dropping replicated tables.

Ultimately, the failure to drop replicated tables was what prevented this from being a total disaster.  Nonetheless, several small look-up tables and one really large table (>1bil rows) were gone, all in the matter of 2 seconds.

What did I learn?
1) Never skip my morning coffee. Never.
2) I now always prefix my DEV and TEST scripts with something like this:
[cc lang="tsql"]
Use databaseName;
Go

If @@ServerName Not In (‘DEVSERVER’, ‘TESTSERVER’)
RaisError(‘Sorry, this cannot be executed here!’, 15, 1);
Else
/* Execute Code */
[/cc]

I’m calling on Jeff Belina, SQL Developer Extraordinaire. He doesn’t have a blog but that doesn’t mean he can’t post. ;)

P.S. Thanks for the plug, Jason!

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