Oops! I forgot to tell my mom to resize her photos before uploading them to RealCajunRecipes.com. We had colossal 7MB+ images floating around on the web server, and SSD space doesn't come cheap. No problem, I just installed ImageMagick, backed up my directories, then ran the following command which finds all the 1MB+ …

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 …

I'm not super familiar with ThinApping, but converted portions of this VMware login script at the request of a consultant. I tried to automate the script a bit more than the one from VMware's blog. Their script required that you put in the path to each EXE. This script will find all exes within a directory and register …

I always forget where to look when searching for various CSV formats to help with my scripting QA. Recently, I stumbled upon data.gov again and it's like, the best government website I've ever seen. It's not only gorgeous, but it's also easy to navigate (Just hit the Data menu item at the top and search for some data.) …

I had the hardest time finding this information. I'm currently making a whole bunch of Animated Gifs to demonstrate the functionality of some of my SQL Server/PowerShell scripts (using a combination of Camtasia and iMovie). I'm trying to keep the size of the file (and thus the video dimensions) small but the version of …

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 Analyzer) 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 controller, …

Recently, while trying to use New-WebServiceProxy to automate some SharePoint form entries, I ran into a lookup issue. First, I got this rather generic error: Exception calling "GetListItems" with "7" argument(s): "Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException' was …