I was able to breakdown what #SQLFamily means to me into 3 categories:

• Technology
• Professional Development
• Personal Relationships

Technology

I cannot think of another technical community out there that offers so many great opportunities to learn about a product like SQL Server.  I’m not just talking about the “paid” events like the PASS Summit, SQLConnections, or SQLRally.

I’m also talking about all the free training out there the local PASS Chapter meetings, SQLSaturdays, 24 hours of PASS, websites, blogs, etc…. people are PASSionate about SQL Server and love sharing their knowledge which is AMAZING.

There are also social networking tools like Twitter (#SQLHelp, #SQLPASS, #SQLFamily), Facebook, LinkedIn, and my new found friend Yammer to use to find even more knowledge.

There are so many ways to get amazing information from some of the best in the business.

Professional Development

Being part of the #SQLFamily means that you are able to surround yourself with people who are like you and people that you aspire to be like.  I can honestly say that if I didn’t jump into the SQL Server Community with both feet I wouldn’t of met the people responsible for helping me:

• Start Blogging here at BenchmarkITConsulting.com
• Start EDMPASS (The Edmonton PASS Chapter)
• Co-Author my first book (Pro SQL Server 2008 Policy Based Management)
• Become the Western Canada Regional Mentor for PASS

All of which has helped me professionally to grow my knowledge,  name, and business as an Independent Consultant.

Personal Relationships

This is what I believe REALLY sets the #SQLFamily apart from other technology communities.

(This is the hardest section of this blog post to describe because to me it is such a phenomenon so bare with me)

The people care, they really do care.  It really is like a family… you might not see everyone as much as you’d like but when you do it’s like you haven’t skipped a beat.  The friendships and camaraderie that I’ve developed through the #SQLFamily are not just “work friends” but real honest to goodness friends.

If someone’s child is sick, they care.  If someone needs to find a new job, they help.  If someone needs an extra $25 in his Movember campaign to take first place, they donate (thanks Jason Strate BTW)

I’m a better person professionally and personally because of my #SQLFamily.

If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

Something that has been problematic at best for developers to deal with historically is the idea of “paging”. Basically being able to say that if I was assuming 10 rows per page, I want to see what the contents of page 250 would be.

In order for you to work with my example (which uses a tweaked version of the “10,000 Random Names Database” you’ll need to download the following file (and be working with CTP3 of SQL2012) :

10000 Random Names File

Right Click and save it in a location that you will reference in the following SQL Script:

IF  EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[tblNames]') AND type in (N'U'))
DROP TABLE [dbo].[tblNames]
GO
CREATE TABLE tblNames
(
	NameID		INT PRIMARY KEY,
	FirstName	NVARCHAR(100),
	LastName	NVARCHAR(100)
)
BULK INSERT tblNames
FROM	'C:\BLOG\10000RandomNames.csv'
WITH
(
	FIELDTERMINATOR = ',',
	ROWTERMINATOR = '\n'
)
GO
CREATE INDEX idx_tblNames_LastName ON tblNames(LastName)
----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------
DECLARE	@RowsPerPage INT = 10
DECLARE	@PageRequest INT = 250
 
SELECT	NameID, FirstName, LastName
FROM	dbo.tblNames
ORDER BY LastName
OFFSET (@RowsPerPage * (@PageRequest - 1)) ROWS
FETCH NEXT @RowsPerPage ROWS ONLY

So let breakdown what we’ve done here:

• Created our working table
• Populated with the contents of the 10000 Random Names File
• Created an index on LastName (not required by the DBA in me thought it was necessary )
• Declared 2 variables
  • @RowsPerPage - This is the number of rows contained on a page
  • @PageRequest – This is the page that I’m looking to retrieve
• Ran a SELECT statement utilizing the new “OFFSET” and “FETCH” parameters to return me @RowsPerPage (10 rows) of data starting at offset @PageRequest (page 250)

How cool is that?

Books Online Reference: ORDER BY Clause: Paging

If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

I’m proud to announce that I am a finalist for this years Exceptional DBA Award from Red Gate.  It is an honor to be selected as a candidate to receive this award because being an exceptional DBA is something that I take very seriously.  If you don’t “know” me or haven’t chatted with me in the past I’ve included my bio and thoughts as to why I think I am an Exceptional DBA (and no it doesn’t include #Bacon or #Jager). 

You can also find my bio (along with the bios of all the other nominees) on the Voting Page.

Colin Stasiuk has worked with SQL Server for the past 15 years and has been (what he considers to be) a DBA for 12 of those years. He graduated from college in 1997 and was asked to start working for that same college immediately. It is here that Colin got his first “real-world” exposure to SQL Server (version 6.5 at the time). Throughout the years Colin has worked exclusively with SQL Server learning and developing his skills as a DBA while always being praised for not only his dedication to the technology but his ability to communicate effectively with his subordinates, peers, and upper management.

In March of 2008 Colin decided to become an independent consultant and accepted his first contract with the Government of Alberta in Edmonton Canada. Through the process of “going indy” Colin stopped being a voyeur of the SQL Community and with the guidance of some key individuals jumped into the community with both feet. Colin started EDMPASS (The Edmonton Chapter of PASS) and his blog to help reach out and start to give back to the SQL community. He has presented at EDMPASS numerous times and was asked to speak at Microsoft Tech-Days in Edmonton. In April of 2010 Colin co-authored his first Apress book: “Pro SQL Server 2008 Policy Based Management”.

Why do you think you should win the Exceptional DBA Award?

“I love what I do; being a DBA has not only provided a great life for myself and my family, but has given me the ability and skillset to help protect the most important asset of a company: its data. Since the age of 17 I’ve been lucky enough to find my niche, and have grown over the past 15 years to become a trusted resource of many companies in North America. One of my greatest professional achievements is that I stay in touch with many of my former employers and each one of them has told me the same thing; that they would hire me back in a second. I am very passionate about empowering other DBAs and developers with the knowledge I have to help them be effective in their roles. Training and experience can make you a DBA, the willingness and ability to share your knowledge effectively makes you an Exceptional DBA.”

 If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

Let’s say you’re creating a stored procedure that needs to create a #temp table that has a PRIMARY KEY.  You will want to be careful about how you create this #temp table and here is why:

Open SQL Server Management Studio and run the following command:

SELECT	GETDATE() AS 'TheDate'
INTO	#TMP1
ALTER TABLE #TMP1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_TMP1 PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (TheDate)
GO

Now if you open a new Management Studio query window and run the exact same code (simulating what a stored procedure would do) what do you get?

Because you created your PRIMARY KEY constraint after the fact (and had to give it a name) you lose the uniqueness of the PRIMARY KEY name.

SELECT	*
FROM	tempdb.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS
WHERE	TABLE_NAME like '%#TMP1%'

So how do you get around this?

CREATE TABLE #TMP1(TheDate DATETIME PRIMARY KEY)
GO
SELECT	*
FROM	tempdb.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS
WHERE	TABLE_NAME like '%#TMP1%'

and if you run this in 3 different query windows….

 Now I used Primary Keys as my example but this same “gotcha” applies to constraints in general.  If you were to add a check constraint that validated “TheDate” and gave that check constraint a name you would run into the same “cannot create constraint… duplicate object” error. 

Moral of the story: When dealing with temporary tables in reuseable code (like stored procedures) don’t name your constraints.

And now you know….

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

I’m now happy to formally announce that I’m the new Senior DBA for Invidi.

This is an exciting opportunity for me to work with a fairly young company that has grown exponentially over the last decade to be a leader in targeted television advertising and promotion.  Invidi’s technology allows television service providers to simultaneously deliver multiple and distinct commercial streams to different households or set-top boxes during a single commercial break.

What that means is that 2 people watching the exact same program at the exact same time will have a different commercial stream that is suited to them.  Through the use of “Audience Classifiers” that take into account what they’re watching, gender, age, income, and geo-location and continual analysis of viewer behavior and click streams you will see a custom set of commercial that are focused to you and your interests. 

Pretty cool stuff

Thanks to everyone for their kind words in support of my announcement.  If you’ve reached out to me via this blog, email, facebook, or twitter I appreciate all the thoughts and comments.

Have a great day

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

I know as an independent contractor change is constant but sometimes it hits you alot more than others.  I’ve been at my current “gig” for almost 3 years so deciding to wind down and leave comes with it’s fair share of emotions, emotions that I haven’t felt since I was a full-time employee.

The team I currently work with are awesome, professionally and personally.  I can’t say enough good things about them and I’m sure we’ll stay in touch as I wont be far away (only a few buildings over actually LOL).

So if the contract is great and the people are great then why the change?

When I’m happy with my current “situation” I don’t go looking for other opportunities but that being said sometimes opportunities come looking for me.  I’ve always had the point of view that you should never close yourself off fully to new opportunities.  I’ve been very blessed to have a bunch of companies approach me over the last 3 years and although I didn’t pursue any of those opportunities myself I tried to help them find a good fit through EDMPASS and its members that requested to be notified of potential new job opportunities.

This was one of those opportunities that found me and originally I was just going to do what I normally would do and try to help them find a good fit, but the more I heard about the company and role the more I wanted to pursue it for myself.  The interview process was quite extensive as it included a 2 part knowledge exam and an all day in person interview.  The 2 part exam got the “can this person DO the job” out of the way but the attention to team fit and personality of the all day in person interview was something that I think more companies should do (even with their contractors).

It seems the winds of change have blown my way, I’m constantly seeing tweets and blog posts from the SQL Community about changing jobs, new opportunities, etc so I guess I’m just going to add to the pile with this one.

Have a great day!!

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

Deep huh?

Well if the job actually does something important of course it will get noticed. 

So the bigger question is:

What can you do to make sure that YOU know about it before anyone else does? 

Cause who likes surprise phone calls?

This is a multipart-answer so bare with me…

Step 1.  Setup a Policy Based Management condition to find SQL Server Agent Jobs with NO notification on Failure

DOWNLOAD CONDITION

Step 2.  Setup a Policy Based Management policy to check the condition created in Step 1

DOWNLOAD POLICY

OK so this will do nothing more then tell you whether or not the SQL Server you are evaluating this policy against has jobs that do not have a notification on failure configured. 

What if my SQL Server Agent has 500 jobs? How do I find the ones without failure notifications configured?

Step 3. 

SELECT * 
FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobs 
WHERE [enabled] = 1 AND notify_level_email NOT IN (1,2,3)

Fantastic so what if you have 500 jobs and 499 of these jobs DO NOT have any notification on failure configured?

Step4.  Script to update all jobs to include a notification on failure

*** MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS IS DOING BEFORE RUNNING THE OUTPUT ***

What this script will do is provide you with the commands to update ALL your jobs to notify BY EMAIL to the operator you provide in the @NotifyOperator variable

USE [msdb] 
DECLARE @NotifyOperator nvarchar(100) 
SELECT @NotifyOperator = 'DBA' 
SELECT 'EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_update_job @job_id=N''' + convert(nvarchar(50),job_id) + ''', @notify_level_email=2, @notify_email_operator_name=N''' + @NotifyOperator + '''' FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobs

Tweak this as you see fit:

• Include a WHERE clause to exclude or include only certain jobs
• Change additional notification options (page? net send? etc?)

 So there you go… you now have:

• A check condition and policy to identify jobs that DO NOT have some level of notification
• A script to identify which jobs those are
• A script to blanket update all jobs to a particular notification level and settings.

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

Taking backups is half the job, don’t forget to restore them

Tag Time

• Grant Fritchey (blog @GFritchey )
• Aaron Bertrand ( blog @AaronBertrand )
• Jorge Segarra ( blog @SQLChicken )

Great idea Tom!!

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

I’ve been working alot with CDC the last little while and found these couple of scripts very useful. These scripts are handy in a DEV type of environment… you should be alot pickier about what you use CDC for but if you’re looking to play around and get your hands dirty then these are the scripts for you.

The first script:

• Checks to see if CDC is enabled
• Enabled CDC
• Creates an “Audit” schema
• Add all tables to CDC
• Create a useful CDC view for each table in the “Audit” schema
• Change the default CDC retention period

The second script tears it all down:

• Drops the views
• Disables the tables from CDC
• Drops the “Audit” Schema
• Disables CDC from the database

FIRST SCRIPT

USE DB_NAME
GO
SET NOCOUNT ON
GO
DECLARE @is_cdc_enabled int
DECLARE @cdc_schema_id int
DECLARE @Role_Name nvarchar(100)
DECLARE @CDC_Retention int
DECLARE @SQL_STMT nvarchar(2000)
DECLARE @RowCount int
DECLARE @CDC_TableName nvarchar(256)
DECLARE @ColumnList nvarchar(2000)
 
SELECT	@Role_Name = NULL
SELECT	@CDC_Retention = 13148730 -- 25 years in minutes
 
/*
**********************************************
		ENABLE AND CONFIGURE CDC
**********************************************
*/
SELECT	@is_cdc_enabled = is_cdc_enabled
FROM	sys.databases
WHERE	[name] = DB_NAME()
 
IF	@is_cdc_enabled != 1
BEGIN
	EXEC sys.sp_cdc_enable_db
END
 
SELECT @SQL_STMT = 'CREATE SCHEMA [Audit] AUTHORIZATION [dbo]'
 
IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM sys.schemas WHERE name = 'Audit')
BEGIN
	EXEC sp_executesql @SQL_STMT
END
 
/*
**********************************************
		ADD TABLES TO CDC
**********************************************
*/
 
SELECT	@cdc_schema_id = [schema_id]
FROM	sys.schemas
WHERE	[name] = 'cdc'
 
SELECT	[name] as 'CDC_TableName'
INTO	#UserTables
FROM	sys.objects
WHERE	type = 'U' and
		is_ms_shipped != 1 and
		[schema_id] != @cdc_schema_id
 
SELECT	@RowCount = COUNT(1)
FROM	#UserTables
 
WHILE	@RowCount != 0
BEGIN
	SELECT TOP 1 @CDC_TableName = CDC_TableName
	FROM	#UserTables
 
	SELECT @SQL_STMT = 'EXEC sys.sp_cdc_enable_table
      @source_schema = ''dbo'',
      @source_name   = ''' + @CDC_TableName + ''',
      @role_name     = null;'
 
	EXEC sp_executesql @SQL_STMT
 
	SELECT	@ColumnList = STUFF(COLUMN_NAME, 1, 1, '')
	FROM	sys.tables t CROSS APPLY  (SELECT	',' + name AS [text()]
									   FROM		sys.columns c
									   WHERE    c.object_id = t.object_id
									   FOR XML PATH('')) o (COLUMN_NAME)
	WHERE OBJECT_NAME(t.[object_id]) = @CDC_TableName
 
	SELECT	@SQL_STMT = 'CREATE VIEW Audit.vw_' + @CDC_TableName +
			' AS     SELECT A.__$start_lsn as ''StartLSN'',
     B.tran_begin_time as ''TransactionStartTime'',
      B.tran_end_time as ''TransactionEndTime'',
      CASE
       WHEN A.__$operation = 1 THEN ''DELETE''
       WHEN A.__$operation = 2 THEN ''INSERT''
       WHEN A.__$operation = 3 THEN ''UPDATE_BEFORE''
       WHEN A.__$operation = 4 THEN ''UPDATE_AFTER''
      END as ''Operation'', ' +
      @ColumnList +
      ' FROM cdc.dbo_' + @CDC_TableName + '_CT A INNER JOIN
  cdc.lsn_time_mapping B ON A.__$start_lsn = B.start_lsn'
 
	EXEC sp_executesql @SQL_STMT
 
	DELETE
	FROM #UserTables
	WHERE	CDC_TableName = @CDC_TableName
 
	SELECT @RowCount = @RowCount - 1
 
END
 
DROP TABLE #UserTables
 
/*
**********************************************
		CHANGE CDC RETENTION
**********************************************
*/
 
EXECUTE sys.sp_cdc_change_job
        @job_type = N'cleanup',
        @retention = @CDC_Retention

SECOND SCRIPT

/*
**********************************************
		TEAR IT DOWN SCRIPT
**********************************************
*/
USE DB_NAME
GO
DECLARE @Audit_schema_id int
DECLARE @RowCount int
DECLARE @ViewName nvarchar(256)
DECLARE @TableName nvarchar(256)
DECLARE @SQL_STMT nvarchar(2000)
 
SELECT	@Audit_schema_id = [schema_id]
FROM	sys.schemas
WHERE	[name] = 'Audit'
 
SELECT	name as 'ViewName'
INTO	#AuditViews
FROM	sys.views
WHERE	schema_id = @Audit_schema_id
 
SELECT	@RowCount = COUNT(1)
FROM	#AuditViews
 
WHILE	@RowCount != 0
BEGIN
	SELECT TOP 1 @ViewName = ViewName
	FROM	#AuditViews
 
	SELECT @SQL_STMT = 'DROP VIEW Audit.' + @ViewName
 
	EXEC sp_executesql @SQL_STMT
 
	DELETE
	FROM #AuditViews
	WHERE	ViewName = @ViewName
 
	SELECT @RowCount = @RowCount - 1
 
END
 
DROP TABLE #AuditViews
 
SELECT	[name] as 'TableName'
INTO	#CDC_TrackedTables
FROM	sys.tables
WHERE	is_tracked_by_cdc = 1
 
SELECT	@RowCount = COUNT(1)
FROM	#CDC_TrackedTables
 
WHILE	@RowCount != 0
BEGIN
	SELECT TOP 1 @TableName = TableName
	FROM	#CDC_TrackedTables
 
	SELECT @SQL_STMT = 'EXEC sys.sp_cdc_disable_table
      @source_schema = ''dbo'',
      @source_name   = ''' + @TableName + ''',
      @capture_instance     = N''All'';'
 
	EXEC sp_executesql @SQL_STMT
 
	DELETE
	FROM #CDC_TrackedTables
	WHERE	TableName = @TableName
 
	SELECT @RowCount = @RowCount - 1
 
END
 
DROP TABLE #CDC_TrackedTables
 
SELECT @SQL_STMT = 'DROP SCHEMA [Audit]'
 
IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM sys.schemas WHERE name = 'Audit')
BEGIN
	EXEC sp_executesql @SQL_STMT
END
 
EXEC sys.sp_cdc_disable_db

There ya go… now you don’t have a reason not to get in there and play around

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)