Category: Hints and Tips

Setting up a SQL Server 2016 Always On Availability Group

For database high availability, SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG) are the gold standard.  These were first introduced in SQL Server 2012 and Microsoft has continued to improve and add features to help protect your data with each new version.

This is an Enterprise Edition feature, so it is not inexpensive to roll this out.

Setting this up was a great learning experience for me.  I have setup AG’s before, but I have never setup a network or clustering before, so I did learn a lot of new skills.

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Setting up SQL Server Database Mail

Today I am going to write about how to setup SQL Server Database Mail.  This is very handy as the server will be able to email you query results, whether a maintenance job succeeded or failed, status results, etc. Continue reading Setting up SQL Server Database Mail

Add Parameter to SSRS Report

In a previous posting, I showed you how to create a Vendor listing report using SSDT and SSRS.  This was a handy report, but it showed all of the data in the tables and you could not search on specific criteria.  This week I am going to show you how to create a parameterized version of the report so you can search by area code or really any part of the phone number.

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Speed up Linked Server Connection To Oracle using OPENQUERY

Last time I showed how to create a connection to an Oracle database by creating a Linked Server in SQL Server.  Most of the time this works fine, but when you are pulling a lot of information, it tends to run slow.  By using OPENQUERY, the query will run very, very fast.

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SQL Saturday #708 Cleveland 2018

Last week I attended SQL Saturday.  In last years posting: SQLSaturday #595 Cleveland 2017 I explained all of the benefits and all of the great FREE training and networking that you can do.  This year I will give you a rundown of the sessions I attended in 2018.

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