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.
SQLPass unfortunately can’t last forever, but happily it’s still going strong. Here’s some highlights from my Day #2.
Yesterday was day 1 of SQL PASS 2009. I am attending a variety of sessions on execution plans this year, and along the way I heard three very different opinions yesterday on managing the procedure cache in presentations.
Once Upon A Time there was an Orphan Database…
I needed to drop a formerly-logshipped database on our warm standby server. When attempting to drop it, I found that it failed because it was a logshipped database from a replication publisher. Hmm.
Sometimes tempdb is filling up. Sometimes I just want to monitor the amount of tempdb and check out execution plans of heavy tempdb users while watching performance on a server.
This evening during some maintenance I was reminded of one very important rule: when looking into any issue on a windows server, never forget to check the Windows Event Log.
Today I was glancing at once of my servers and noticed the backup job was running later than normal. I haven’t been working with this server for long, so I glanced to check where the backup was writing to and checked the output directory. I found that a differential backup was being written, and that the differential backup from the day before was much larger than normal.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.