Sql-Server

In an earlier post, I mentioned that you can create a registered list of servers, either in Local Server Groups or stored in a Central Management Server.

What I didn’t really talk about though, is what you can do with these groups of servers, rather than just executing queries on an individual server.

I’ve created three local server groups, for my development, UAT, and production servers.

The Development Servers group has three database servers in it. If I right-click the group, rather than any individual server, we get these options:

2018-11-01

One of the challenges when you have foreign keys in place, is that there are restrictions on what you can do to tables that are the targets of the foreign keys. What’s often needed though is a list of all references to a particular table or set of tables.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a function ListIncomingForeignKeys to do just that, and to provide their details in a form that’s easy to consume programmatically if you need that.

2018-10-31

I was at a client site the other day and they were puzzled by SQL Server object permissions. In particular, they couldn’t understand what the point of the REFERENCES permission is. It seemed pointless to them. It’s not. Let me explain why.

Keep in mind that if all the objects in the database have the same owner, then this isn’t an issue. But not all databases are like that. Many have different teams that control different parts of a large database.

2018-10-29

When working with SQL Server systems, it can be hard to remember the names of all the servers, to remember connection details for the ones that need SQL logins (instead of Windows authentication), and to remember other details of those servers, such as which environments they are part of (eg: production, UAT, test)

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has a facility to help you to do this. It allows you to register server details in a single place.

2018-10-25

In a previous post, I talked about the ListForeignKeys procedure as part of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs. That procedure returned one row per foreign key. Sometimes though, you need to process each column of a foreign key separately. So we’ve provided the ListForeignKeyColumns tool to do that.

The tool also detects any keys that are using system-generated names. (We don’t recommend that).

You can see how to execute it in the main image above. The procedure takes these parameters:

2018-10-24

I’ve done a lot of Microsoft certification exams over the years. Most of those have been SQL Server exams. The quality of the questions in those exams though, varies enormously.

One of the exams that really drove me crazy a while back was one of the intro-level ones. The problem was with the number of errors in the exam. When the question-writer gives you five substantial blocks of T-SQL, and asks which one is correct, yet they are all actually wrong in some way, that makes it a very, very tough question to answer. I find these types of exams very tiring because I’m endlessly trying to second guess what the question writer actually meant to ask. Some exams have a large number of these.

2018-10-22

This is probably one of the simplest tips that I’ve published, yet I’m endlessly surprised how many people do not realize that it’s available.

When you have a script loaded in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and you execute the script, you might run into an error like this:

To find where the error is, just double-click the error down in the Messages tab. I double-clicked it, and it took me directly to the error and highlighted it:

2018-10-18

In SQL Server Management Studio, there’s no great way to list all the foreign keys that are defined in a database.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a function ListForeignKeys to do just that, and to provide their details in a form that’s easy to consume programmatically if you need that.

You can see how to execute it in the main image above. The procedure takes these parameters:

2018-10-17

SDU Tools is a toolkit that’s simple to use, has many useful functions, procedures, and views, and is updated regularly. Even if you aren’t using the tools as a set, they provide wonderful examples of how to do things in T-SQL. We have released version 12.0 of these popular tools.

The tools are free tools for DBAS and Developers. Tools for comparing databases, tables, finding unused indexes, manipulating strings, performance tuning converting data, and so much more.

2018-10-15

When you right-click a table in SQL Server Management Studio, you get options for selecting or editing but the number of rows is limited: