SQL Server 2008/2008R2: My Favorite Feature

1. My New Crush: PowerPivot

When it comes to R2, PowerPivot is the big charmer for me. It’s as much fun as my spiralizer, and that’s saying a lot. If you don’t know what a spiralizer is, it’s a magical little piece of plastic with a few blades that lets you turn a zuchinni into super long curly strands of veggie pasta, which makes it suddenly more than normal squash. You can also make curly fries, slice onions, and do all sorts of crazy cool things a normal person can’t make with an ordinary kitchen knife.

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Little Things That Count: Copying Names in Management Studio

This post is about a really little detail that isn’t a big deal.

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SQL 2008 Agent Jobs - Tokens work in PowerShell!

I have been working away building out servers in our new prod test environment, and automating as much as possible along the way with PowerShell. I  have to say that it’s been really fun and PoSH has brought back that loving feeling that I always had for Perl.  If a programming language can be friendly, PowerShell manages it.

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Automating SQL Local Security Policy Rights: PoSH and NTRights

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:

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Are you Slipstreaming? The Very Best Way to Install SQL Server!

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.

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The Case of the Undroppable Database

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.

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Using Last Backup Date to Switch Between Full and Differential Backups

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.

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