{"id":2468,"date":"2007-04-12T03:56:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-12T03:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.simple-talk.com\/uncategorized\/its-like-being-stoned-to-death-with-marshmallows\/"},"modified":"2016-07-28T10:49:03","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T10:49:03","slug":"its-like-being-stoned-to-death-with-marshmallows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/blogs\/its-like-being-stoned-to-death-with-marshmallows\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s like being stoned to death with marshmallows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s amazing what you learn reading MSDN. It has recently been my joy to have to discover everything I&#8217;ve never really wanted to know about the internal system tables of SQL Server 2005. I don&#8217;t mean those lovely system views that they&#8217;ve created. I mean all the grubby nasty little tables with names like <code>sys.objects$<\/code> and <code>sys.syssingleobjrefs<\/code>. To do this you require a dedicated admin connection (DAC) to the sql server instance that you want to investigate.<\/p>\n<p>Initially I was looking at the tables via the command line <code>sqlcmd -A<\/code>, this was all good clean fun but not brilliant for having a good look at the data. So I went googling and discovered a neat little trick for getting the DAC open in SQL Manglement Studio. It goes something like this&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Simply prefix the connection of a query window with the string &#8220;admin:&#8221; &#8211; yes as simple as that, so in my case the server I was connecting to was &#8220;admin:richardsql2005&#8221;. A simple trick but well worth knowing, so now I can go back to looking at all these strange tables Microsoft never intended mere mortals to investigate.<\/p>\n<p>Wish me luck, if I&#8217;m not back in 7 days send a search party.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/msdn2.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/ms178068.aspx\">http:\/\/msdn2.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/ms178068.aspx<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s amazing what you learn reading MSDN. It has recently been my joy to have to discover everything I&#8217;ve never really wanted to know about the internal system tables of SQL Server 2005. I don&#8217;t mean those lovely system views that they&#8217;ve created. I mean all the grubby nasty little tables with names like sys.objects$&#8230;&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24437,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468\/revisions\/24437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2468"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}