I am doing the below : RESTORE DATABASE UAT FROM DISK = ‘E:\Databases\backup\MY_LIVE_20120720_070001.bak’ WITH REPLACE But I want to be able to use a file location that ignores the numbers in the file name (which represent the date) in my back up file. There will only ever be one ‘MY_LIVE_****.bak’ but its number string will change each day. The goal is to restore my UAT instance from live each week, using the latest backup – [...]

The following commands restore filelistonly from disk = ‘C:\….bak’ restore verifyonly from disk = ‘C:\….bak’ produce this error The media family on device ‘C:\…bak’ is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family. This command restore headeronly from disk = ‘C:\….bak’ produces BackupName BackupDescription BackupType ExpirationDate Compressed Position DeviceType UserName ServerName DatabaseName DatabaseVersion DatabaseCreationDate BackupSize FirstLSN LastLSN CheckpointLSN DatabaseBackupLSN BackupStartDate BackupFinishDate SortOrder CodePage UnicodeLocaleId UnicodeComparisonStyle CompatibilityLevel SoftwareVendorId SoftwareVersionMajor SoftwareVersionMinor SoftwareVersionBuild MachineName Flags BindingID RecoveryForkID [...]

I understand SQL Server doesn’t release the memory unless the OS needs it. Then, monitoring Available Bytes (free memory) is not the best way to monitor the service. What other variables can give me a real measure about the behaviour of the SQL Server? Maybe Pages/sec or Page Faults/sec? I’m using nagios to monitor the service and sometimes the alerts arise because a big query is executed. Asked by HD. You can get proper memory [...]

i am encountering a very strange error on the my tfs server. I have a server on which i’m hosting the tfs instance and a server in witch i’m hosting the sql backend for the tfs. The thing is that i want to move the sql instance on another server, a task which i have done once before, and for some reason the tfs server doesn’t want to cooperate. The actions i have undertaken till [...]

This one’s kind of weird, at least to me. I’ve got MSSQL server 2k5 (STD) installed on Server 2k3 R2 SP2 (on account of some legacy software that doesn’t yet support x64 or Server 2008), using Windows Authentication. It’s configured to accept local or remote connections, over either TCP/IP (2) or Named Pipes (3). (I’ve tried disabling Named Pipes, didn’t help.) I can connect to it remotely from any of our SQL servers, and if [...]

What is the best configuration for a load balanced server farm for a high demand download web page that uses php and mysql. I have servers that currently use centos with lightppd. Has anyone got experience of what software is the best etc, or a good guide. Asked by user1074541 I use apache for my web server and it works fine. You have to install another package or service to acquire load balancing. I experience [...]

I want to run my 2(two) SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition as if one server. If one server is too busy, system should direct the requests to other server. How can I do this? Thanks.. Asked by user741319 SQL Server does not support scale out functionality out of the box. Doing so is actually quite complex and typically requires a lot of application redesign in order to be done correctly. Are you sure that [...]

I’m getting really slow queries in MS SQL Server 2008 R2 on my dev machine. This problem has been plaguing me for about a month. Other developers don’t have the same problem, but we all run the same code. It seems to be that any query that includes a JOIN takes >20s, some taking up to a minute. Inserts and updates are fast. The total database size is about 30MB, so it’s hardly huge. During [...]

There is a user account that someone set up on one of our database servers long ago, that no-one any longer knows the password for. However some apps have the password (for various reasons we cannot recover the password from the apps). Unfortunately we want to point the apps at a new server and will backup and restore the relevant databases to this new server – is there a way to copy the login from [...]

We have a database hosted by SQL Azure, and accessed via a REST service that itself is accessible only via https. We wonder though whether we should encrypt all or part of the database in case it was to be accessed by a hacker (we are not a prime target, but students will know of the system). The Azure database is set up with firewall rules to allow only a few systems access. Would encrypting [...]