The Ashdar Partners Blog

This is great: SQL Sentrys' Plan Explorer(tm) is now free for all users. I haven't been doing much plan analysis lately, as I have been working with largely legacy SQL Server 2008 R2 (and earlier) code.  I did spend a lot of time with the free version of Plan Explorer about a year and a half ago. I'm unaware of a better tool for it's specific task. While I am on the subject, the other things that round out my SSMS extensions are: Poor Man's T-Sql Formatter . There is a downloadable for SSMS & Visual Studio. Mladen Prajdić 's  SSMS Tools Pack .  I have been surviving on this, mostly, as it's free for legacy use and I've got a lot of legacy... Redgates' SQL Search tool .  It is a little quirky, but I've been using it for years and I'm well used to it. I've been experimenting with the ApexSQL Refactor and Search tools lately, but I haven't committed to them yet. I like the "reformat" that Apex provides. It is ...

(With apologies to David Foster Wallace.) I follow various tags on stackexchange  sites, primarily database-related things. If you do this for long enough, you will see certain questions come up again and again. Frequently Asked Questions. FAQs. This is not a new phenomenon, it dates from the days of USENET and probably even before then One of those FAQs is: "OMG, something horrible happened to my database, I don't have any backups and now I think my boss will yell at me and hurt my feelings. How can I restore the data before that happens?". As a DBA, your first job is being able to restore the data . Just backing up the database isn't any good if you can't restore it. It doesn't matter if you are using SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, postgresql or any other data storage technology. It doesn't matter if you are an "accidental DBA" and would rather be coding. (I started my career as a coder and, frankly, I would rather be coding too.) People rely o...

This blog post mentions some of the most interesting articles that I have read recently, with a little bit of my commentary on each article.   I read  "Implementing SQL Server solutions using Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects-a compendium of project experiences" . If you are using "Data Dude" in VS, you should read it to. Even if you don't implement all of the suggestions that @jamiet, it will give you a better idea of what is possible. The downside is that you may have to put a fair amount of time into improving things like build output or creating data that can be loaded into a development database that might not match the size of the production database, yet provides enough coverage to provide realistic query plans and durations. PMs are not always sympathetic to spending  time on "features" that users do not see.  Having spent a lot of time with Database Projects myself, you can burn a lot of energy trying to get the tool to do what y...

Whenever I do anything with an SSRS server, I always backup the key and park it somewhere. Automating that would be handy, and  this seems to fit the bill nearly 100%. The only additional think that I would like to see something that uses PasswordSafe or KeePass to keep a password, rather than a table.