The Network Team is still thinking that Automatic Windows Update was accidentally enabled on this server. Jeff, are you saying that even if that was the case, only the OS...

Oh, ok. So maybe not a Windows update. Hmmm...

Windows 2012R2.

Our latest suspicion is that someone inadvertently turned on Windows Update on the server. I'll let you know what we find out.

--=Chuck

I looked up Backup Encryption, and apparently in SQL Server 2014 it's available for the Standard Edition.

--=cf

We're actually discussing this right now at our organization, so this seems like a perfect time to ask for some advice 🙂

While our backups are currently placed in a location...

That's right on the mark. Thanks a million.

--=Chuck

It's a server that's been connecting to it's database via a SQL Server account, until this morning when it started also trying to use this AD machine account. The admin...

In this case the login is failing, because it's a new attempt to login with an account that was never setup in the SQL Server environment. Or maybe I'm reading...

This would have been helpful to know for a preliminary data load we were doing the other day. We simply wanted a quick load of 250,000+ records to see what...

I tried sending emails in blocks of n emails with m seconds between, and I thought I had it with 30 emails sent with a 60-second wait. But that only...

Each email is customized for the recipient, so they have to go out separately.

I'll try sending in blocks with a delay. SQL Server seems to be processing the first...

Even if it's not indexed, with a CASE statement, you're still asking SQL Server to convert every DATE value to a VARCHAR before it can compare it to your string...

Maybe this would be better, in the case of DATETIME2, one of the more experienced SQL Server developers could let us know:

WHERE OrderDT > DATEFROMPARTS(2014, 01, 01) and

...

I don't think either would be a better performer. The better performer would be

SELECT CASE YEAR(OrderDT)

WHEN 2014 THEN 'Year 1'

WHEN 2013 THEN 'Year 2'

WHEN 2012 THEN 'Year 3'

ELSE 'Year 4...

I would say that it had no real-world application, mostly since it prevents you from using any indexing on the OrderDt field. I guess if you were dead-set on using...