Midnight DBA

PASS Special: What can I say... every time we talk to Itzik, he shows us why he's one of the best. He's so composed, and such an experienced teacher, that we both just sit there in awe. Itzik really is the man and we got him for you again.

Users don't need special permissions to change their own passwords, but there is a minor trick to it. Here I'll show you 3 ways that ordinary users can changed their own passwords without any elevated privileges.

Here I troubleshoot why a user's default schema isn't being honored.

Have you ever been plagued by a file you couldn't delete or move because it was being held open by something else? Well here I'm going to show you how to find out what's holding the file open so you can go deal with it.

This was such a fun week. We talked about our new videos and our new reviews on ITBookworm. We also have our T-SQL spotlight, interview question of the week, and so much more.

Here I talk about UNION and UNION ALL, and the different rules about using ORDER BY, GROUP BY, SELECT INTO, and INSERT INTO with a UNION/UNION ALL query.

Have you ever wanted to be able to view instance-level stats or change certain values without having to use the GUI? Here I'll show you how to do all your boxes with Powershell.

There's a lovely sp_configure option that can help you keep the size of your plan cache under control. Let's go have some fun.

Lots of news this week beginning with Adam Mechanic's new training company, SSIS improvements in Denali, and some training camps. We also talk about log shipping, and much more.

This was a fun episode. We talk about Intel's SSD bug, Denali CTP3 is available, restoring backups over the network, and much much more.

One irritating thing about SSRS is that you have to set the text box properties (say, to format numbers as currency) for each individual text box, unlike Excel. Here's a better way (with some restrictions) to update the formatting for multiple text boxes. Companion tutorial to my Tip: <a href = "http://www.midnightdba.com/Jen/2010/08/tip-change-multiple-field-formats-in-ssrs">Change Multiple Field Formats in SSRS</a>

Knowing how and when to use Insert Into or Select Into can quite often make or break your load process. Here I show you how to tell the difference between them and what their effects are.

Here we create, populate and format a simple SSRS report. This is a companion to my Petri article <a href = "http://www.petri.co.il/sql-reporting-services-create-edit-reports.htm">How to Create and Edit a Report in SQL Server Reporting Services</a>

We're kicking off another season with a bang. We get to talk to Paul Nielsen, the author of the SQL Server Bible series of books, and we reveal a new award.

If Windows has ever bluescreened on you, then you know how important it can be to find the issue. Windows creates a crash dump file whenever it bluescreens and here I'm going to show you how to use that dump file to figure out what caused the bluescreen.