On a recent project, I needed to delete archive folders that were older than a specified number of days. The thing that made this a little more challenging is that there were Daily, Weekly, and Monthly folders (similar to the screenshot below); each of which had a different retention period. I found several scripts to [Keep reading...]
As part of a recent project, I needed to check if a file existed before starting an SSIS package to import that file. The catch was that I did not know what time time file was going to be placed on the file system. If the SSIS package runs and the file does not exist [Keep reading...]
I’ve started working with SSIS a lot more lately. I am going to attempt to document here some of the quirks that took me a little while to figure out along the way. In this tidbit, I have a multi-step SSIS package that needs to be run on a daily basis. However, one step of [Keep reading...]
Wow, somehow I managed to not post anything here for 6 months! I started a new job since then, which has kept me really busy, and I did not make the time for posting anything on my blog. The big news is that Pittsburgh’s SQL Satuday is this Saturday October 6 at La Roche in [Keep reading...]
I needed to import a list of all Active Directory user accounts into a table in SQL Server for a recent project. This project also gave me a perfect opportunity to learn a little bit of powershell. Below chronicles the script that I built. I’m going to skip over a lot of the powershell basics [Keep reading...]
This month’s TSQL Tuesday is hosted by Argenis Fernandez. This month’s topic: ”blog about your experience. Tell us why you specialized, or why you’d like to specialize. If you don’t think that specialization is a good thing, tell us why. Discuss. Argue your point(s).” ================================================= My first job out of college was a Network Administrator for [Keep reading...]
This is a quick one today as a follow-up to my previous post on using the SSMS Template explorer. While I do like the convenience of using the template explorer to store frequently used scripts, one of my biggest complaints was the fact that all the scripts are buried several directories down under the C:\users directory (windows [Keep reading...]
The topic for this month’s TSQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen White, is an invitation to share your tricks. Before I get into my trick to share, I wanted to mention that Allen is a pretty awesome speaker too. I got to see his session “Gather SQL Server Performance Data with Powershell” at the SQL Saturday [Keep reading...]
Whenever I restore a production database to a development server, I often end up with orphaned users. You can see in the screen shot below that username matt has no login associated with it. An account becomes orphaned when there is a user account with security rights in the database that is not linked to [Keep reading...]
This month’s TSQL Tuesday topic, hosted by Stuart Ainsworth, is Joins. I am going to share a story of a performance improvement that I made with joined views. One of the main vendor-built applications that I support has views built on top of tables. Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story. These views are [Keep reading...]