Welcome to Database Weekly

Twitter launches two-factor authentication, too late to save The Onion Login authentication aims to stem flood of accounts exposed by phishing attacks. read more... Microsoft unveils Xbox One next-generation console Microsoft has unveiled the Xbox One, a voice and gesture-controlled "all-in-one" system offering games, live TV, movies and music, which will go on sale later this year. read more... Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) We all dread the scenario whereby SQL Server is under so much load and has a complete lack of resources that no further connections can be made. Although extreme and a situation I have never been in there is a saving grace, one last chance before opting for measures that will induce outages, the Dedicated Administrator Connection or DAC. read more... Dealing with Windows Azure Storage transient faults When an application uses a service, errors can occur because of temporary conditions such as intermittent service, infrastructure-level faults, network issues, or explicit throttling by the service. These types of error occur more frequently with cloud-based services, but can also occur in on-premises solutions. read more... Cloud Broiler: Hyper-V: A Platform that Scales out for Building the Largest Public and Private Clouds The Microsoft Cloud Platform Team explain what is new in Hyper-V, the "crown jewel of their enterprise virtualization and private cloud strategy", and what you can do with hypervisor technology out of the box in Windows Server 2012 today. read more... Using Scoped Assignments To Show Calendar and Financial Year-To-Date Values In The Same Calculated Measure A worked example of how to use scoped assignments to implement two different types year-to-date calculation on two different hierarchies in the same dimension. read more... On how to Googlify your SQL statements for future searching For sake of future generations, let’s begin to reduce typing and reuse code we’ve built. BitBarbarian expains how atools like SSMSToolsPack and SSMSBoost can help. read more... Microsoft SQL Server Continuous Integration [slides] This presentation shows how to simplify your database deployments, ensure that no database changes are overlooked, and implement unit tests using the suite of Red Gate developer tools. read more... Performance and Stability-Related Fixes in All SQL Server 2008 SP2 Cumulative Updates SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 was retired and became an “unsupported service pack” back on September 17, 2012. Despite this, Glenn Berry is still encountering a lot of systems still running SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 or older lately, so lists out some of the most relevant hotfixes in all eleven of the SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Cumulative Updates. read more... Getting Started with the SSAS Tabular Model SSAS Tabular models are in-memory databases that model data with relational constructs such as tables and relationships, in order to provide a rapid and powerful way of providing self-service BI to client applications such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power View. You’ve deployed SSAS in tabular mode, and deployed Adventureworks into it. What next? Rob Sheldon explains all. read more... New SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Issues found by sp_Blitz This custom metric adds Brent Ozar's popular SP_Blitz scripts to Red Gate SQL Monitor. It looks for configuration, security, health and performance problems, and reports back with a list of issues for you to look into. It’s great for quickly understanding the state of a server you’ve been asked to look after. read more... How to Fix Orphaned SQL Users Recently I had to involve in a database migration task. I backed up the database and restored successfully in the new server. However when I access the database through the web site, database login didn’t work. The problem was even though the database user is included in the restored database; the login information was not there. So I re-created the login in the server, but it also didn’t work. This phenomenon is called "orphaned users". read more... Wildcards and Indexes I was asked a good question the other day, one that I wasn’t sure of the answer. The question was “does SQL Server use an index if you have a wildcard in the search predicate?” read more... How do I map a differential/transaction log backup to its full backup without using MSDB? If you have multiple full, differential and transaction log backups, there are chances you may end up facing the following error below during the restore process: “This differential backup cannot be restored because the database has not been restored to the correct earlier state”. read more... Writing T-SQL Merge Statements the Right Way The first of a series articles which David Stein hopes will clear up some of the misconceptions around use of the MERGE statment in SQL Server. read more... Microsoft Free Software – a personal top ten Hyper-V Server, Microsoft Security Essentials, System Center Advisor, SQL Server Express and more... read more... AdventureWorks on Azure now hosted by Red Gate software Red Gate Software takes on hosting the AdventureWorks 2012 sample database on the Azure platform. read more... sp_spaceused Alternative Andrew Kelly provides his own alternative to sp_spaceused. read more... How to Manage Vendor Databases [Video] Are you frustrated by third party applications that you can’t change, but you have to support? Tired of beating your head against the wall when your users complain about things you can’t fix? In this 30-minute session, Brent Ozar will show you his favorite tricks to get the most performance without losing support. read more... Read-Only Access to Virtual Center for DBAs Jonathan Kehayias shows how easy it is to configure permissions for vCenter, as a reference for DBAs to provide to VM administrators when requesting access. read more...