I’m converting some Firebird database code to T-SQL and I’m seeing a lot of code that doesn’t work in the same way that SQL Server. No surprise - I already expected that but for those that still say that “all engines/databases are equal”…“is SQL right?” here is another proof that is not true.

On Firebird it is possible to use the CAST function using a DOMAIN (the equivalent in SQLServer is UDDT - User-Defined Data Types ) as target data-type, well turns out that on SQL Server…that is not possible.

Continue reading

On one of the last clients I have worked, I have implemented dbachecks in order to get the state of art and know how cool or bad the environments are before start knocking down the bad practices.

This client has seven different environments with more than 100 instances and more than 2000 databases.

Serial execution

A non-parallel execution (single session) took more than 2 hours. This is not a big problem when we run it out of hours and we don’t want/need to be looking or waiting for it to finish. I set up it to run at 6 in the morning and when I arrive at the office I can refresh the Power BI dashboard a get a recent state of art.

Continue reading

dbachecks has seen the light about two months ago. As I’m writing this blog post, the module counts with more than 2600 downloads just from the PowerShell gallery . The module has about 110 configurable checks that make our live easier!

Today I will write about an option that I think users still do not realize that exists.

The default

dbachecks works with the values previously saved (for that we use Set-DbcConfig). This means that when we start a new session and the last session has changed any configuration, that configuration is now, by default, the one that will be used in the new session.

Continue reading

I’m currently working on a SQL code migration from Firebird to SQL Server and I hit an error that I haven’t seen for some time.

The error message is the following:

Msg 206, Level 16, State 2, Line 4 Operand type clash: datetime2 is incompatible with int

This ringed the bell right away! Somewhere on the code someone was trying to do an arithmetic calculation without using the proper function.

Continue reading

dbachecks is a new PowerShell module from the SQL Server Community! For more information, read introducing dbachecks .

If you don’t know dbachecks, we have released a good amount of blog posts that will help you: Announcing dbachecks – Configurable PowerShell Validation For Your SQL Instances by Rob Sewell introducing dbachecks - a new module from the dbatools team! by Chrissy LeMaire install dbachecks by Chrissy LeMaire dbachecks commands by Chrissy LeMaire dbachecks – Using Power BI dashboards to analyse results by Cláudio Silva My wrapper for dbachecks by Tony Wilhelm Checking backups with dbachecks by Jess Promfret dbachecks please! by Garry Bargsley dbachecks – Configuration Deep Dive by Rob Sewell Test Log Shipping with dbachecks Checking your backup strategy with dbachecks by Joshua Corrick Enterprise-level reporting with dbachecks by Jason Squires Adding your own checks to dbachecks by Shane O’Neill dbachecks - A different approach for an in-progress and incremental validation by Cláudio Silva

Continue reading