If you need to find out who is currently connected to your databases or how many users are currently connected, the two scripts below are life savers.
Continue reading SQL Server find users connected to databases
Category: Hints and Tips
SSRS – Create no rows retrieved message
After creating a report in SSRS you may not have data for every day. When this happens the report just shows as blank. For the End User, does that mean the report is broken or is there just no data for that day?
SSISDBBackup.bak could not be accessed
If you try and create an Integration Services Catalog and you receive the error SSISDBBackup.bak could not be accessed, it could be because you do not have Integration Services installed on your SQL Server instance.
SSRS…How to bold part of an expression
Can you bold part of an expression in your SSRS report? YES! By using placeholders and some HTML tags you can.
Create Alerts for Availability Groups
Now that you have your SQL Server Availability Groups up and running, how do you know if there is a problem? You can always look at the AG Dashboard, or even better you can set up database alerts to send you an email or page you in case of certain problems.
Add a Database to an Availability Group
You have additional databases that you want to add to your already created Availability Group, what do you do? Follow these directions, and you will have them added in no time.
Patching SQL Server Availability Group Servers
Now that you have an Availability Group setup, what can you do with it? Well, now you can patch your servers with almost zero downtime by doing rolling upgrades. For our 24*7 economy, downtime can be very expensive in lost sales, people not being able to work, etc. I am going to walk you through the process of installing Windows Updates on my three server cluster.
Continue reading Patching SQL Server Availability Group Servers
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.
Continue reading Setting up a SQL Server 2016 Always On Availability Group
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.
Jim Salasek's SQL Server Blog 