Recently, I had a database go into the dreaded SUSPECT mode after a failed byte-level replication. Once I brought it into EMERGENCY mode, an unknown, automated program immediately connected to it from several different servers. Killing the connections and setting the db to single-user mode only created more headaches …

SQL Server 2008 has backup compression built-in, but for SQL Server 2005 and below, you can compress backups using makecab from the command line or xp_cmdshell. Makecab even has a better compression ratio than gzip and does not require additional software to be installed on the server. 1makecab D:\backups\dbname.bak …

Sometimes, there's a need to schedule a "ping" to a webpage (that needs to be pre-compiled, for instance). While using PowerShell is the easiest way to do this, it's not always available on older server, while VBScript is nearly always a safe bet. The biggest issue with using VBScript or the command line is …

So here's an error that, at the time I encountered it, did not have a great deal of information about it on the web: The system definition with the same name as this data source already exists in the Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store and it refers to a different data source. Cannot complete operation …

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

Note (2025): This post focuses on deploying SSIS Maintenance Plans for SQL Server 2005/2008 using the Microsoft.SqlServer.ManagedDTS 10.0 assembly. The guidance remains accurate for those versions. For newer SQL Server releases, use the corresponding ManagedDTS assembly that ships with SSIS/SSDT (for example, v13–v16). …

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 have not 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 …

[Update 2025] PPTP is now widely considered insecure and deprecated for new deployments due to known weaknesses in MS-CHAPv2/MPPE. Prefer modern VPNs like WireGuard or OpenVPN. The setup below remains for historical reference and reflects what I ran in 2011. Firesheep got me thinkin' that I should probably do a little …