Midnight DBA

At the risk of stealing his thunder, I think I'll make my first blog post about Sean's latest greatest idea, the Midnight Snacks.  We'll soon be offering daily video snippets, or "Snacks", for your edification.  I've just recorded a few vids on one of the great unsung heroes of computing, the keyboard shortcut.  Here's the cheat sheets to go along with those vids:

Favorite keyboard shortcuts

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1 - Text editing keyboard shortcuts

CTRL A, S, X, C, V, Z

CTRL Home

CTRL SHIFT End, Home
SHIFT End, Home

 

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2 - Window control/nav keyboard shortcuts

ALT-Tab
ALT-SHIFT Tab
Alt-F4
ALT-SHIFT n, x(, r)
Windows L, R, #... (QuickLaunch in vista, pinned in 7)

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3 - Old school "classic" text menus/kbrd shortcuts

Alt-F C to close
 F N for new file (or ctrl-N)
 F S to save (or ctrl-S)
 F A to save as
 F O to open (or ctrl-O)
 F P to print (or ctrl-P)
Alt-E U to undo (or ctrl-Z)
Alt-E F to find, or F3 (or ctrl-Z)

These are still applicable even when you can't see the text menus, like in IE, and MS Office.

Tags: windows, keyboard, shortcuts, snacks
Categories: Admin | Dev | Windows

Here’s a quick talk on relational multiplication that gets us to take a closer look at what our  joins are really doing.

Here's the vid.

Tags: dev, t-sql
Categories: Dev | T-SQL

Here we discuss relational division, the counterpart to relational multiplication (cross joins).  We’ll hit a couple of examples, using subqueries to implement two different kinds of set division.

 Here's the vid.

Tags: dev, t-sql
Categories:

This is a continuation of the class at the NTSSUG.  These are being held once a month before the main user group meeting.

This class went much smoother than the first one.  I start out with my top 10 list of how powershell is better than your wife,

and I end with my top 10 list of how powershell is better than your husband.  And somewhere in the middle there, we get to some scripting.

Here's the vid.

Tags: admin, powershell
Categories:

Here I show you how to trouble a DB connection issue to eliminate the firewall as a suspect.

Using telnet you can tell pretty clearly whether or not the access is being blocked by the firewall or not.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video is that this works for all DBs and not just SQL Server.

And again, you have to verify that the server is actively accepting connections.  But this is a really good way

to determine whether the firewall is blocking access or not.

Here's the vid.

Tags: admin, troubleshoot, telnet
Categories:

This is a live class I gave at the NTSSUG (North Texas SQL Server User Group).

Let me just say now that it was a disaster from the start.  My laptop wouldn’t  work with the projector so

I had to use someone else’s box at the last minute so I hadn’t tested my demos on that box and to top things off,

the guy who was supposed to speak after me wasn’t ready so I had to go completely without a script for over an hour so I got into some things

I wasn’t prepared for.  That said, it’s still a decent class and will give you an idea of powershell.

But it was definitely one of those nights when I was initially thrown by problems in the beginning and never got back on track.

Here's the vid.

Tags: admin, powershell
Categories:

Here I show you how to trouble a DB connection issue to eliminate the firewall as a suspect.

Using telnet you can tell pretty clearly whether or not the access is being blocked by the firewall or not.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video is that this works for all DBs and not just SQL Server.

And again, you have to verify that the server is actively accepting connections.  But this is a really good way

to determine whether the firewall is blocking access or not.

Here's the vid.

Tags: admin, troubleshoot, telnet
Categories:

Continuing with schemas, here I talk about ownership chaining and how schema ownership effects them.

I start with the basics of chaining and then get into the meat of the topic right after that.

 Here's the vid.

Tags: admin, schema
Categories:

I got a user question through email and rather write-out how to do this, I just shot him a quick video.  So the quality isn't that good, and I used the camera this time, but hey, you either wanna know how to create a subreport or you don't.  Hope you like it.

Here's the video.

Tags: ssrs, dev
Categories:

 Here I finally address how to connect to SQL Server from powershell proper by adding the SQL Server snapins.  Then I show you how to add them to your profile so you don’t have to add them manually every time you start powershell.

Here's the vid.

Tags: powershell, scripting, admin
Categories: