SQL This!

If you're an active DBA, you'll find that your mornings are spent reviewing failed jobs and checking to see what else needs watching. At my company we were fortunate to purchase Idera's Diagnostic Manager. It is a good tool for reviewing your databases at a quick glance and identify any areas that need attention, ie. Space constratins, failed jobs and other critical processes. Not everyone has the ability to go out and spend thousands of dollars on a monitoring solution. That's why I really liked the following article by David Bird over at Sql Server Central (one of my favorite Sql Sites) titled SQL Overview IV - DBA's Morning Review (http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administration/63042/). In it he describes a set of reports that you can use to review your servers quickly during the morning and spend more time fixing problems than reviewing things. I Plan to implement many of these solutions in my own environment and see how well it stacks up to our p...

On occasion you may be tasked with switching your recovery model for a database. This task is very trivial and you may already know how to do this via Sql Server Enterprise Manager or even Management Studio. But you can do this via Tsql as well (as with all things sql server related) The syntax is basically ALTER DATABASE Northwinds SET RECOVERY SIMPLE The recovery Models available are, Simple, BulkLogged and Full. The Simple Recovery model is as you guessed the basic recovery model which pretty much allows you to recover your database from a full backup. The simple recovery model is ideal for test and development databases where data loss is not generally a concern. You may wish never to use this model in a production environment unless the business is willing to loose up all data changes since the last Full or Differential backup. In this model you do not have to maintain the Transaction log as nothing is generally written to it. The BulkLogged Recovery model will log e...