Wayne Sheffield

My blog about SQL Server

Browsing Posts in SQL

It used to be hard to remove an old server from the SSMS connection dialog. Now, it’s easy-peasy. This blog post shows you how to perform this frequently needed action.

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.

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 […]

SSMS 17.3 SSMS 17.3 was just released (download link), and it has a couple of new features worthy of mention: Import Flat File Wizard XEvent Profiler Import Flat File Wizard If you’ve worked with SQL Server for very long, you have most likely needed to import flat files from time to time. SSMS 17.3 utilizes […]

It’s not stable until Service Pack 1… Are you at a company that doesn’t install a new version of SQL Server until Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been released? Well, you need not wait for SP1 any more. Because there’s not going to be any more service packs. Microsoft just announced their “Modern Servicing Module […]

Announcing Seattle Freecon 2017 Are you going to the PASS Summit this year? (and if not… why not?) Are you coming in to Seattle on or before Tuesday? Are you not attending any of the wonderful precons at the PASS Summit on Tuesday? Then I have a great deal for you. Come attend the Seattle […]

In a recent post, I introduced you to how to work with the registry directly from within SQL Server. Continuing this theme, this post provides an example situation where you would do so. In this example, we will want to configure SQL Server to enable a few trace flags (TF) when SQL Server starts. Specifically, […]

There is a lot of information within the Windows registry. Sometimes, it would sure be nice to work with the registry within your T-SQL scripts. As it turns out, there are a bunch of undocumented extended stored procedures that do just this. A listing of these procedures are: As you can see, there are two […]

In order for your SQL Server instance to run optimally, there are many SQL Server best practices that you need to follow. The SQL Health Check that you can have us perform on your instances looks at many of these. SQL Server 2016, which at the time of this writing is in a Release Candidate […]