Have you ever had the need to build an IN list from some rows you had in excel? Or maybe you have a bunch of data you pulled out of a results set from some other server somewhere and you are unable to join tables so you need to plug the values into an... Continue Reading →
"I just tried restoring a copy of my database but now the original's in recovery" That was the panicked question that I was asked earlier today and as it's something that I've seen come up more than a couple of times, I thought I'd write up a lunchtime quickie to explain the issue. If you... Continue Reading →
Holy Database Restores Batman, sp_RestoreScript 1.1 is now available in the Undercover Toolbox and at UNDERCOVER TOOLBOX: sp_RestoreScript – A Painless way to generate SQL Server database restore scripts. This update fixes an issue that we've found when running on SQL Servers prior to 2016.
We had a little play around writing our own encryption algorithms and cracking them in Secret Codes And SQL Server, Part 1: Writing Our Own Encryption Algorithm and Cracking it. I thought I'd see if we can go a step further and start having a look at how we could take those basic ideas and try... Continue Reading →
I quite often find myself scripting objects out via T-SQL rather than using the GUI, it's not that I have anything against using the GUI to script out a Stored procedure, it's just that sometimes this can be time-consuming especially when there are alot of stored procedures in the Programmability folder. I know that... Continue Reading →
One question that seems to come up on the forums again and again is, 'how can I see when my database was last backed up?'. There are always a bunch of answers and some very convoluted scripts thrown around. As a bit of a lunchtime quickie today I thought I'd share with you a script... Continue Reading →
In one of my previous posts I went over a scenario where an Auto restore job was logging Restore errors to a table and the error that was being inserted was '3013 - RESTORE LOG is terminating abnormally' and this was due to SQL Server only providing the Last most error produced which is stored... Continue Reading →
After my last post on The Arcane Science of Bitwise Logic and SQL Server I was asked a couple of questions on where it's used so I thought I'd write a follow up post. At first I was going to write something on bitmaps but then a thought of another area where bitwise logic is... Continue Reading →
Bitwise logic, it seems is one of those ancient areas of computing that's only remembered by those old guys that have been kicking around for years. But what is it and how can we use it in SQL? Before we start looking at bitwise logic and the bitwise operators, we need to have a quick... Continue Reading →
(Latest Version 1.8 - 23 November 2020) I'm sure we've all been there, we need to restore a database to 11:34am, four days ago. What's the first step? To go off hunting down the relevant full and differential backups and then figure out what transaction logs we need to play in and in what order.... Continue Reading →
SQL Undercover 