Wayne Sheffield

My blog about SQL Server

The internet has many examples of temporary table usage, including ways of checking for temporary table existence. It is unfortunate that many of these ways are wrong. This article will go over why these methods are wrong, and it will conclude by showing the proper way of checking for temporary table existence.

When you have an Availability Group, you will end up with jobs that you want to run only on the primary replica. Yet, the job should be installed identically on all replicas. This post shows several methods of creating primary replica jobs that will only run on the primary replica.

Whether you are a “use tabs” or “use spaces” type of person, this article will show you how to configure SSMS to work with tabs and spaces. It then goes in to show how to see what you really have in a file, and how to easily convert them from one type to another.

Get more out of SSMS. There’s a lot of stuff built in to help you be more productive, but many don’t know about it. Find out what SSMS has to offer in this month long series of SSMS tips and tricks.

Remove the clutter from SSMS by switching to full screen mode. SSMS goes to maximum size, minimal toolbars and buttons to get in your way.

As you already know, SQL Server runs as a service. And services require a service account to run under. While this service account is likely to be a domain service account, it could be an account on the local machine. To follow good security practices you would need to specify that this account: Has the […]

One of the most basic actions dealing with a SQL Server instance is connecting to that instance. In this post, we’ll cover the many possible ways of connecting to a SQL Server instance.

In this post, you can learn how to control what information is SSMS displays in the status bar and on the query tabs. De-clutter or prevent duplicate information – it’s easy to control what you get.

SSMS provides an Activity Monitor, a process that displays various information about what all is going on with the instance. This is available by right-clicking on the server and selecting Activity Monitor, or by selecting the toolbar icon for it. Either of these options will bring up the Activity Monitor in a new tab. In […]

SSMS has a lot of reports available for you to use. Most of the reports in SSMS are off of either the server node, or the database nodes. Simply right-click the node, and select reports. The server level reports are: And the database level reports are: Each of these reports provide useful, timely information. Once […]