Microsoft Windows

The Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 launch was more informative that I thought

Yesterday was the Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 launch event here in Southern California (Orange County to be specific, Burbank is on Wednesday).  For the most part I was planning on going to pick up a couple of tidbits of information, and a free copy on Windows 7 Ultimate (I’m not stupid, someone offers me a free Windows license, I’m going to take it).  However the day was much more informative that I had expected that’s for sure.

In this post I’m going to cover some of the high level information, then over a few future posts I’ll give more into what was covered. Continued »

I’ve got some money for an upgrade, what should I upgrade?

So you are going along your normal day, and your boss comes up to you and tells you “We’ve got a few thousand bucks left in this years budget, what would you like to upgrade?”  Assuming that new 26″ monitors for your workstation are out of the question, the boss is probably talking about a server upgrade here so lets see what we can do. Continued »

This isn’t your grand-mothers bingo game (#sqlbingo)

This year at the PASS Summit there will be a daily bingo game.  This isn’t the standard sit in a room while someone calls out numbers.  No you have to find the people who’s names and faces (for the most part) are on the bingo cards. Continued »

The polished turd that is Dell’s Gold Level Support department really isn’t all that supporting

If you follow me on twitter then you’ve heard bits and pieces of this already on my twitter stream.

In preparation for the onslaught of security patches which were released on October 14, 2009 I went ahead and patched all our severs the day before as it had been a couple of weeks since I had triggered patching and I wanted to get everything else installed so that there wouldn’t be any dependency issues with installing the new patches.  All of our servers, about 60 in all, patched correctly except for two of the three servers which host our web application which our customers use.  Now I say that two of the three servers didn’t patch correctly, but the third server wasn’t allowed to reboot so I don’t know if that one patched corrected or not at the time.  But with two machines of the three offline, I wasn’t willing to chance it. Continued »

I’m totally going to crash the Quest event this Friday

Shhh… Don’t tell anyone, put I’m planning on sneaking into Quest’s presentation this Friday (which in itself is a feet when half the people there know you by site) grabbing some of the free lunch, and giving a quick presentation on Virtualization. Continued »

SQL 2005 SP3 Failing to install with password length error

When installing SQL Server 2005 SP3 you may get an error about the password being to short, and it may have nothing to do with your sa password.  It’s because the Install Scripts are trying to create a certificate with a password which doesn’t meet your domain’s password requirements.

If you get this error navigate to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Upgrade folder.  Find the script for upgrading the SQL Agent.  Open the script and find the CREATE CERTIFICATE statement.  Make the password longer.  In my case I added 123456@ to the end of the password.  The password is in two different places in the script.

Then open Add/Remove Programs and select SQL Server 2005 and select Change.  Then run though the wizard to complete the installation of the service pack.

Denny

SQL Server 2008 Clustering Article in SQL Server Magazine

For those of you who haven’t check out this months SQL Server Magazine, the cover article was written by yours truly about Clustering SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008.  This is an updated version of the article I did last December on Clustering SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003.

I hope that you find it handy.  (Subscription is required.)

Denny

Clearing the Windows page file and its effect on server performance

I just published a new article over on SearchSQLServer.com about “Clearing the Windows page file and its effect on server performance“.  In the article I talk about the pros and cons of telling Windows to clear out the page file when the server is rebooted.

Denny

Single Instance vs Multiple Instances

I see this question quite a bit, should I use a single instance or one instance per application database on my server. Continued »

Windows 2008, where oh where has all my drive space gone?

If you are using Windows 2008, you may be like me.  Wondering where the hell all this drive space is disapearing to. Continued »