Tonight, I published Invoke-Locate.ps1 to ScriptCenter because I was tired of mounting my Windows drive to my Linux servers to quickly and reliably find files. Originally, it was going to be a small script, but then I decided to trick it out, add an installer and automatic Task Scheduling to run updatedb.

The installer …

I'm currently working on a PowerShell/SQL set of scripts to ease SQL Server Migrations. A few of the scripts have been posted to Microsoft's ScriptCenter. Recently, one of the ScriptCenter visitors asked:

Can this script be used to backup all server configuration and restore at a later date. The use case I have is that …

A buddy of mine was running into issues importing a 1 GB CSV of Longitudes and Latitudes available from geonames.org. The CSV contains over 9 million rows, and no matter what he did, DTS/SSIS would not import the data because of conversion issues. That's actually been happening to me a lot lately, too, so I find myself …

After a December 2013 patching downtime, I noticed an abrupt decrease of almost 50% in the performance of 2 SQL Servers.  Both servers were running on HP DL580 G7s.  After many hours of testing and data collection, we finally updated the BIOS firmware from 7/01/2013 to 10/31/2013.

The issue immediately resolved itself. …

I've always found basic administration of SQL Server to be fairly straight-forward, but for a long while, I felt very uneasy about troubleshooting SQL Server performance issues.  Any DBA knows that the most productive periods of learning arise when there are problems.  For the past few months, I've been trying to track …

Recently, we decided to buy a few licenses of Confio Ignite (Now SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor) to monitor some of our high-profile SQL Servers.  I'm definitely not posting a sales pitch, but for me, it's provided insight into SQL Server that is much more difficult to obtain through traditional methods.  One …

As DBAs, one of the most  common tasks performed is the installation of new SQL Servers.  While I've installed hundreds of SQL Server instances over the years, I only recently come across the error described below.  In the past, I've seen the SSPI context error, but it is usually tied to an issue with a domain …

One of the things I love most about SuSE is how well it integrates with Active Directory. Joining a domain is easy when using yast. First I ensured that the Linux server's DNS server is pointed to my DC, then yast -> Network Services -> Windows Domain Membership. …

Recently I was tasked with migrating all SQL 2008 R1 and prior databases to SQL 2008 R2 and SQL 2012.  One of my qualifying applications was Lync 2010.  We were under the impression that SQL 2012 would be fine for the Lync 2010 installation.  After migrating the database and updating the connections, Lync would not …

Unfortunately, there are no native PowerShell Failover Cluster cmdlets which will give you the volume information for disks in a cluster. I've seen some bloggers use Get-ClusterSharedVolume but a Cluster Shared Volume or CSV is different from volumes used within a SQL cluster.

The script below, which was written with …