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When I wrote my previous blog post about blogging, I remembered how much of a sucker for the concept of recursion I'd become, even though it still bewilders me,  after I'd read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter.  I'd refer to it familiarly as GEB if I had a pointier head.  Alas, my head is too ...

It's no small secret that I'm a big fan of using PowerShell to manage SQL Servers.  I've gone through all the trouble of loading the SQL Server assemblies and/or configured PowerShell to use the SQL Server provider, and I've jumped into SMO, sometimes to much joy, and sometimes to much sorrow.  But, the other day I started to wonder, ...

In a previous blog post I talked about being puzzled as to why I wasn't able to get, in my mind, accurate table counts for a database in SQL Server 2005 that had over 50,000 tables.  I kept getting only 1,000.  With the help of Chad Miller, I've figured it out. To reiterate, when I had navigated to the PSDrive for the tables within one ...

One of the applications we have from a vendor has a SQL Server 2005 database with over 50,000 tables.  I was using the PowerShell provider for SQL Server to search through the tables to find any that had the word 'ROLE' in it using the following command: get-childitem *ROLE* But, in the results, only two tables where returned, and I was ...

Chad Miller, one of my favorite bloggers on SQL Server and PowerShell, has just announced the release of version 1.5 of SQLPSX.  SQLPSX is a collection of functions, cmdlets, and scripts that make accessing SQL Server via PowerShell extremely easy. For example, normally, without even considering error handling, you'd have to write the ...

When I start to learn a new technology, I find I learn best if I jump right in, get my hands dirty, and play around with it for a while.  After a couple initial ah-HA moments and early successes, I inevitably hit a wall where I can't seem to solve a particular problem.  By that time, I've built up quite a list of questions, and I'm ready ...

I normally do not write opinion pieces, I feel that if I can contribute anything worthwhile to the community my efforts are best served explaining or demonstrating a technical area where I have some level of expertise.  I have however one subject that I have been mulling over for the past few days that is an exception to this rule, that is ...

A request came in from one of the developers asking if there was a way to script out all of the triggers for a list of tables in a database on SQL Server 2005.  This database has around 60k tables, and navigating to each of the 40 some tables that the developer needed triggers for in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) was becoming quite a ...

If your company is like mine, you are largely at the mercy of your software vendors as to when you'll be upgrading to SQL Server 2008.  But, if you're like me, you want to start taking advantage of the features of the SQLPS mini-shell in your regular PowerShell today, particularly with administering your SQL Server 2005 instances.  The ...

Alright everyone has written the obligatory ''Hello World!'' program when they start to learn a new language.  I have my own variety of that practice and its PrimeFinder.  Whenever I start to learn a new language I write a program that finds primes.  I know this may sound a little strange but this normally allows me to practice a ...