There are a couple of local security policy rights that are not granted by default in SQL Server setup that I’ve been setting manually for a few years now:
Somehow, I didn’t know about slipstreaming installations of SQL Server until last week. I heard about them at SQLPASS in Allan Hirt’s session on installing SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 clusters.
Here’s a query I found useful today– this week we moved many of our production datamart servers to SQL 2K5 SP3 CU4, and today among the course of other issues I wanted to take a look at my job runtimes to see if they might be noticeably slower or faster than prior runs. I often am in a similar situation after deploying significant changes to our codebase.
My life is a bit easier since I learned how to use SQL agent tokens. They are particularly nice for setting date and timestamps on backup files. Unfortunately, they only work in the context of executing agent jobs.
One reason I started this blog was just the idea of going through my catalog of scripts and reviewing them and sharing out what might be useful to people.
Here is a quick one I put together a while back. I was starting to work with a group of servers [at an unnamed company, always an unnamed company!]. Some of the instances had been configured long ago, and I found some linked servers where passwords had been hardcoded into the login mappings.
I am going to post my monstrously big index query.
Why? Because it’s AWESOME. No really, it actually is awesome. At least, if you like that sort of thing. I use some variant of this almost daily, and I tweak it fairly regularly to suit the needs of whatever I’m working on. So it’s a work in progress, but I find it constantly valuable.
Each time I work with a new system, it can take a while to familiarize myself with what all the SQL Server Agent jobs do. Often there are quite a few jobs, and sometimes they have legacy names that either don’t describe what the job does very well anymore, or is just hard to understand.
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