Using xp_cmdshell

Haidong continues to point out ideas that might get you thinking about ways you can do more administration with less work. In this article he demonstrates a couple useful tasks you can do with xp_cmdshell.

You are the DBA at a multinational company...

You are a SQL Server DBA for a...

You need to change an existing DEFAULT constraint...

Automatically Gathering Server Information Part 2

The second part of Steve Jones's series on having SQL Server automatically report information to a DBA.

Using WMI

Get started with using WMI (Windows Mgmt Instrumentation) by seeing two good scripts to start with, one to reboot the server, another to list all the services.

Finding Real Dependencies

Sysdepends is a neat idea, but in practice it's not always accurate. This article talks about why it's not always reliable and presents some code (recursive even!) that will let you find all the dependencies by querying the system tables.

Microsoft product support has asked you to put...

You are a database developer for your company's...

Server side tracing in SQL Server, using system stored procedures

Ever wanted to use the SQL Trace system stored procedures instead of Profiler, but got intimidated by the cryptic system stored procedure calls? Then this article is just for you. It will show you how to use SQL Trace system stored procedures and provide you with wrapper stored procedures, that can be used to quickly get server side traces up and running.