Jonathan Allen 27 October 2014

The best piece of equipment you can take to a tech conference

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Blogs

If you have some spare time and want to meet me for a beer at a conference we can spend a long time talking about the bad points of Windows Phones. However there is one feature that I cannot find on Android or iOS which almost makes it worth carrying around. I have to carry … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 26 September 2014

Web page titles from URL

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Blogs

Nothing wholly SQL Server-related this time but this is something that I have been meaning to write for ages. While searching on the internet for content I gather loads of URLs that might be useful to me and not long after this I lose track of what content is to be found at each location. … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 11 September 2014

Getting Windows power options under control

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Blogs

I work from a laptop, both at work and at home. In both cases the laptop is either plugged in or I am running on battery power and in both cases I want to make sure that I am using an appropriate Windows power profile. When the laptop is plugged in I want High performance … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 03 September 2014

How to set PowerShell_ISE as your default PowerShell editor when working with files in tfs projects

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Blogs

Every good DBA and Developer keeps their code under source control. What? You don’t? Well, read this and then go and investigate it, there are plenty of options, some free, some you need to pay for. Getting that all sorted is content for another blog (or two!) so let’s get back to editing PowerShell files … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 14 August 2014

Checking who is connected to your server, with PowerShell.

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Blogs

There are many occasions when, as a DBA, you want to see who is connected to your SQL Server, along with how they are connecting and what sort of activities they are carrying out. I’m going to look at a couple of ways of getting this information and compare the effort required and the results … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 28 June 2014

You go to the effort of writing a blog and then …

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Blogs

It’s hard work, some find it harder than others, but there are plenty of people making an effort to write down and publish content they want to share. Why then do some of those people having gone to the effort of creating the content fall at the last hurdle when presenting it online? I have … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 10 June 2014

Checking if your SIMPLE databases need a log backup

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Blogs

Hopefully you have read the blog by William Durkin explaining why your SIMPLE databases need a log backup in some cases. There is a SQL Server bug that means in some cases databases are marked as being in SIMPLE RECOVERY but have a log wait type that shows they are not properly configured. Please read … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 27 May 2014

PowerShell and SMO – be careful how you iterate

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Blogs

I’ve yet to have a totally smooth experience with PowerShell and it was late on Friday when I crashed into this problem. I haven’t investigated if this is a generally well understood circumstance and if it is then I apologise for repeating everything. Scenario: I wanted to scan a number of server for many properties, … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 06 May 2014

Jonathan Allen's Top 10 Favourite Simple Talk Articles

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Opinion Pieces

We asked several well-known readers of Simple-Talk to write about their all-time top ten favourite articles from Simple-Talk, and why these articles had particularly appealed to them. First off the blocks is Jonathan Allen, a working DBA who has done so much for the community of SQL Server users in the UK. … Read more

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Opinion Pieces

Jonathan Allen 06 February 2014

Learning by doing (or not)

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Blogs

I have spent a lot of today repeating steps that I followed months ago and it is hopefully through writing it down here that I will remember the steps needed if it happens again. I was building a VM environment on my laptop (using VMWare but that is irrelevant) and it went like: Create VM … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 30 January 2014

Quick Tip: Windows directory file list

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Blogs

In a previous version of Windows (circa Windows95 or older) there was a button in the toolbar of it’s equivalent of Windows Explorer that generated a list of files in the open directory, in a text file. Despite searching through http://toastytech.com/guis/indexwindows.html I cant locate an image of it or find a demo of it in … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 13 January 2014

Backup to the right location, by default.

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Blogs

How do you configure where your database backups are created? Do you have problems updating all of your backup jobs if the backup location needs to change? In this blog we will look at how you can make use of Windows settings and a few lines of simple TSQL to have total control over where … Read more

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Jonathan Allen 23 December 2013

Tribal SQL Awards

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Blogs

This is likely to be my last blog for 2013 and it is one that is going to give you something to do. Yep, you actually HAVE to click a link and do some thinking. Don’t Panic though, it will take maybe 1 minute and a load of people that have given waaaay more than … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 12 December 2013

I Thought Everyone Did It Like That – SSMS Templates

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Blogs

One of an occasional series of blogs about things that I do that perhaps others don’t. SSMS – the default TSQL code editor that comes with SQL Server has many faults and my Twitter stream is often the scene of DBAs and developers venting their frustrations at it’s foibles but it does have some quite … Read more

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Jonathan Allen 10 December 2013

If you could give an aspiring DBA just one piece of advice what would it be?

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Blogs

This post is part of a collection of content masterminded by John Sansom, please see the reference section at the end for the details of how to get all the other thoughts and contributions Prioritise, and Socialise. I have been working in an IT department for almost 15 years now and even before that I … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 28 November 2013

SSRS Table Cells with Mixed Formatting

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Blogs

In this quick post I’ll show you how to create and format a report so that you can configure individual table cells to display their contents with a mixture of text formatting. I have heard many people asking how to achieve this and it wasn’t until I was reading a blog post recently that I … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 14 November 2013

It’s all a numbers game

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Blogs

Just recently I have been using this small amount of code an awful lot so I thought I would share it here. A lot has been written about using a tally or numbers table and I ‘m not about to re-write any of that. This is simply how to create one really quickly. Lets start … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 04 November 2013

I thought everyone did it like this – Training Session Code Management

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Blogs

One of an occasional series of blogs about things that I do that perhaps others don’t. From very early on in my dealings with SQL Server Management Studio I started using Solutions and Projects. This means that I started using them when writing sessions and it wasn’t until speaking with someone at PASS Summit 2013 … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 21 October 2013

PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

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Blogs

So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – … Read more

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Blogs

Jonathan Allen 16 September 2013

SQL Server Policy Based Management – Creating a custom condition

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Blogs

I have recently been looking at Policy Based Management with a view to using it to rapidly review servers in our domain to ensure they meet our configuration requirements. One of our tests is that every server login must only have a default database that meets the following criteria: The database must be online. The … Read more

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Blogs