Friday 30 August 2013

Mini Post: Useful - Colour Coding Your SQL Instances/Queries

Hey everyone just a quick useful something that my colleague reminded me of.

So if you're like me, you may have many queries windows open but they could be from multiple instances of SQL Server, over multiple servers.

It may become a little confusing as to what query is being run on what instance.

Luckily SQL Server gives you the ability to colour code your query windows! You can assign a colour to a particular instance and then all queries that run against that instance will have a band of colour, indicating the instance. Lets take a look after the jump.

Tuesday 27 August 2013

Recreate a 2008 DB on a 2005 Instance

Hey everyone, just a quick note on one way to get data from a 2008 DB to a 2005 DB. (EDIT: This initial "Mini Post" turn out a bit longer than I expected...)

As most of you would know you cannot restore a backup from a newer version of SQL Server on an older instance, so this limits the options you have if you do end up having to this for whatever reason.

Your best option is to generate a script of the DB on the newer instance and execute the script on the older instance.

You can choose to either script the data as well, or you can export the data to either a text file or Excel document and import the data into the 2005 DB afterwards.

Thursday 8 August 2013

Mini Post: Change SQL Server Instance Min/Max Memory Settings

Hey everyone, just a quick note on how to change the min/max memory settings on your SQL Server instance.

By design, your SQL Server service will attempt to use as much memory as it sees fit in order to avoid going back to the disk to store the data it wants to. It will instead attempt to store as much data as possible in memory.
Not setting a max limit on the amount of memory SQL Server should use can greatly negatively impact the service's performance as well as the server's performance and you may start getting memory errors such as:

Error 802
There is insufficient memory available in the buffer pool.