My hero, Brad McGehee, has often advised against shrinking the transaction log when it's unnecessary. According to his (really amazing) SQL Server DBA Best Practices PowerPoint Presentation, shrinking too often can lead to increased file fragmentation and excessive use of resources allocated to grow/shrink the file. …

I feel that my job as a DBA is very dynamic and usually keeps me busy with new things... except for deploying maintenance plans.  I hate making maintenance plans.  Luckily, I at least have a template that I can use to keep everything uniform, but it requires me opening up the plan in Visual Studio every time I want to …

Recently, we've come across poor SQL performance on a very powerful SQL box and we were having trouble identifying the exact cause. After some talks with the software vendor and Microsoft, we were pointed to the TokenAndPermUserStore cache.

There are an increasing amount of articles online that speak about this cache, …

AppleScript is so fun! That and Folder Actions are two of the reasons I love OS X.

So I recently had something come up where I had to make sure anything that was copied into one folder was immediately copied into another. Folder Actions made this simple.. now I haven't added the functionality to make sure that anything …

Disclaimer: This method works well, but I have not researched all of the details of an export -- primarily what's exported, what's not and what are the consequences of using - versions. These are mostly my notes, quick and dirty style.

A task as basic as moving a whole site from one site collection to another should be …

Firesheep got me thinkin' that I should probably do a little more to beef up the security of my Internet connection on public networks. PPTP has always been a favorite of mine, because it hides traffic well enough to deter most people and it's easy to setup on both Linux and Windows. I ran a Windows PPTP server for …

Installing a SQL Server 2008 Failover cluster is actually fairly easy, once you have the Windows Cluster set up. I experienced an issue adding the failover node, which is now a separate process compared to how it was done in SQL Server 2005. I'm not going to cover the entire process in this post, but I wanted to share …

I recently installed BizTalk 2006 and 2009 on a few servers at work. I found the process to be very painful for some reason.

In regards to the BizTalk 2006 installation, I was running into an issue where the installer would error out. I eventually tracked it down to my Virus Scan software blocking the installer from …

Recently, I noticed errors occuring daily at 2:00AM on my SQL Cluster. The errors showed Windows logins being routed to the wrong named instances, along with errors from SQL Browser not being able to service client requests. I noticed that all of the instances being affected were SQL Server 2008, but never any of my …

If you find yourself on a really restrictive network but still want to connect to a remote VPN, consider this solution. It allows you to connect a Mac OS X OpenVPN client to an OpenVPN server using a static key. I figured it out using a combination of webistes, including dd-wrt's OpenVPN wiki, OpenVPN's documentation, …