SQL Server Email Notifications for Back Ups

Heya everyone and, as usual, a big welcome back to SQL Something. :-)

Today’s post is going to illustrate how to set up Email Notifications for SQL Server jobs, specifically for a simple backup job in this case. A friend of mine indicated that they didn’t know how and that inspired this week’s post. 

It’s going to be divided up into three main parts:

• Setting up the Email Account(s) to Send Notifications
• Setting up the Email Account(s) to Receive Notifications
• Setting up the Job with Email Alerts

This blog post is also going to look like it was hit by a picture nuke.

Remove a Database from Single User Mode

Hey everybody! Welcome back to SQL Something.

It’s been a long week but still trying to stick to my self-imposed rule of having one post per week. Here’s a simple one on how to remove Single User Mode from a DB.

Fig. 1: What a DB looks like in Single User Mode in Management Studio.

 

From my readings and my experience it seems a DB could go into single user mode in order to prevent corruption after some form of incorrect action was taken, whether purposefully or not. This recently happened to me when I tried to purposefully break replication. I tried to delete a DB while it was publishing, it then threw an error and curled up in a fetal position in single user mode. Poor little guy.

So how do we take a DB out of Single User Mode? We can try the following:

SQL Server Error: Cannot drop database because it is being used for replication.

Hey everyone! Welcome (or also hopefully "Welcome back") to SQL Something. :-)

This week’s instalment is going to be a little short and focused on fixing the above error that I ran into. 

The general consensus is that this error occurs after Replication was removed from a database and then you attempt to delete the DB. Apparently there might be some replication metadata that was left behind that would cause SQL Server to believe that replication is still taking place. If you attempt to delete the DB, you’ll get the error and it may go into "single user mode" (Access to the DB is restricted to one user; I may make a post on how to get out of it in the future).

As usual I’m gonna post everything I read on how to fix it as well as what I actually did.