Ever jump on a machine to connect to a SQL Server and find out… whoops! No tools.  For some reason, the client machine doesn’t have SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installed.  Now I’m not talking about not having the SSMS installed on the server, but on the local workstation that you need to connect to the server with.

No tools has happened to me many times and, in fact, happened to me this past week.  In the past, this would mean running around trying to get find the client’s SQL Server installation media.  Maybe downloading a 4+ GB ISO of the entire SQL Server installation from TechNet.  Or, hopefully, making sure the client had USB ports open on their machines and that I had my installation media backup drive with me.  A lot of things that were more work than one would like.

With the release of SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1, there is a new option on the table.  Instead of downloading everything, you can download just the management tools through the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Express download page.  Just select either SQLManagementStudio_x64_ENU.exe or SQLManagementStudio_x86_ENU.exe from the download options and you’ll have the full version of SSMS at your fingertips; in about a quarter the size of the full installation download.

For those that follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL), you’ll know that throughout the day I tweet out some links of things I find interesting.  These tweets include “Reading” in the message and are items I’ve read over the past few days, usually after hours when sharing would be less than useful, and spaced out to avoid spamming.  The content of the links usually pertain to SQL Server, technology, and career topics; which I think others would find useful.

Most Popular Link

I wasn’t too surprised by this week’s most popular link.  Negotiating salaries always tends to lack fun and usually were across the desk from someone who’s done this more often that we have.

Reading: “How To Negotiate Your Salary” onforb.es/VkIWU6 #career

— Jason Strate (@StrateSQL) May 8, 2013

Last week’s top 20 “Reading” Links

Along with the top link, here are the top twenty items relating to SQL Server, technology and careers that were sent out last week. Usually, I do a top ten, but I really like the items that were in the top twenty.

1. How To Negotiate Your Salary [51 clicks]
2. Microsoft to fold in-memory database technology into SQL Server Next [44 clicks]
3. The Saddest Thing I Ever Heard a Manager Say [40 clicks]
4. The secrets of body language: why you should never cross your arms again [34 clicks]
5. LinkedIn Labs | InMaps|Visualize your LinkedIn network [30 clicks]
6. SQL Server 2012 partitioned table statistics update behavior change when rebuilding index [26 clicks]
7. SQL Server Alerts with Text Messaging from SQL Server Database Mail [25 clicks]
8. The Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Data Platform Knowledge Exam is available today! [23 clicks]
9. Microsoft Goes After 3 Big Data Myths [21 clicks]
10. Microsoft Azure overtakes Amazon’s cloud in performance test [20 clicks]
11. How to Overcome Perfectionism [20 clicks]
12. Why You Should Write Daily [19 clicks]
13. Analyzing Storage Performance [17 clicks]
14. Career Advice: How to Prepare for a Conference [14 clicks]
15. Using Filtered Indexes to Improve Performance [13 clicks]
16. Understanding the SQL Server 2012 Licensing Model [13 clicks]
17. Drunk falling into a worm [13 clicks]
18. The Ten Commandments of SQL Server Monitoring [13 clicks]
19. 5 Killer Ways to Improve your Writing Right Now [12 clicks]
20. SQL Server 2012 PDW extends big data capability [11 clicks]

Other Stuff Shared

Of course, no week would be complete without a few off-topic links.  These have nothing to do with technology or your career, but they sure are entertaining and interesting (and a couple are pretty gross).

1. How to use a semicolon – The Oatmeal [23 clicks]
2. Funny yearbook photos [17 clicks]
3. 10 Mouthwatering Pick Up Lines To Help You Flirt With Food [16 clicks]
4. LEGO® CUUSOO | Avengers: Iron Man Mark VII Armor [15 clicks]
5. This Lego Mashup of Volkswagen and Star Wars Works Surprisingly Well [15 clicks]
6. I Want These Daft Punk Lego Minifigs More Than Their New Album [15 clicks]
7. Old Spock battles New Spock in the greatest car commercial ever [15 clicks]
8. What to watch on Netflix – Miramax [9 clicks]
9. Roses are red, bacon is red [8 clicks]
10. #Bacon Houses: So Much Uglier Than You’d Imagine [8 clicks]
11. Bacon Cheeseburger Fatty – smoked in a Bradley beef, cheddar [8 clicks]
12. Mark Hamill Wants Less CGI In Star Wars VII | The Mary Sue [7 clicks]

Got something you think I should read and share, leave a comment below.  Also, if you want to see all of the links that were tweeted out last week?  Then follow the links on my tumblr blog or subscribe to it’s RSS feed.

Welcome to this Friday’s reblog summary post.  The aim of these posts is to bring some old posts that newer readers may not have seen back to the forefront.  As with many technology blogs, just because a post is old, doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have value.

Some posts from years gone by that you may have missed are:

• Understanding Query Filters and Clauses (5 May, 2006)
• Room with a View (6 May, 2006)
• How to Sort SSMS Project (8 May, 2006)
• This blog entry brought to you by the procedure “sp_MSForEachDB” (9 May, 2006)
• Sorting Project Files in SSMS (4 May, 2009)
• Snapshots of Index Contention (4 May, 2009)
• Querying for Parallelism (5 May, 2009)
• Finding Objects In Schema (6 May, 2009)
• I Didn’t Receive My Subscription (7 May, 2009)
• More Parallelism (8 May, 2009)
• Searching for Plans (3 May, 2010)
• Can You Dig It? – Determining Index Plan Usage (4 May, 2012)
• “Thou Shall Not Shrink the Database” #TSQL2sDay (8 May, 2012)

Do you have something from years gone by that was posted during this week?  If so, leave a comment below and we’ll give some new life to good knowledge.

I’m a little late getting the information from my Fargo SQL Saturday session posted, titled ”Discovering the Plan Cache“.  But it’s better a little late that never.

Even though it was the end of the day, the session had great turnout and lots of good questions.  Reviewing my session evals, I saw quite a few high marks from people.

Below I’ve included the slide deck that you can flip through in this post, or you can download the deck with the demos included (Discovering the Plan Cache (SQLSat175)).

Additional information: http://www.jasonstrate.com/resources/plan-cache/

Last Thursday, I delivered a presentation for Pragmatic Works Training on the T’s. The session for last week was Introduction to SQL Server Security, a part of last month’s series of introductory presentations.

The abstract for the sessions is:

One of the most often overlooked feature sets of SQL Server is it’s security features. The focus is often on what type of data, how to store the data, and how to get the data out of SQL Server. As DBAs, we also need to be consider how to lock down the data and implement security. In this session, we’ll investigate the basic components of security within SQL Server. Also, we’ll review some practices for that you may want to adopt to secure your environment.

Session Materials

For the presentation materials, you can download them (Introduction to SQL Server Security) or if you just want to flip through the slides, you can do that below.

Additional information: http://www.jasonstrate.com/security-resources/

Twitter Comments

The response from the session was pretty good. Here are a few of the comments that were received after the session.

Thanks to Jason Strate @stratesql for an excellent webinar on security @pragmaticworks@pwfreetraining

— Thomas Sykes (@sqltomato) May 2, 2013

@stratesql was in your SQL SECURITY presentation today.Great job!Took good notes. I think I’m a little smarter!

— CAGrant-Willis (@DBADiva) May 2, 2013

Great presentation on security by @stratesql,@pragmaticworks.Good advice: use Control Server instead of sysadmin. #sqlserver

— Erika Bricker (@DancesWChickens) May 2, 2013

Thanks a lot to everyone that listened in. It’s always a pleasure to present to people and it’s great when people get something from the presentation.  If you have questions on this session, please leave a comment below.

It’s the start of the month of May, or at least the first Monday in May.  Hopefully you aren’t nursing too much pain from a weekend that included two fairly dissimilar holidays.  First, there was Star Wars Day on Saturday.  Followed by Cinco de Mayo on Sunday.  There should have been something in there for everyone that reads this to celebrate, just a little bit.

As I write these friendly reminders to check your SQL Server environments from month to month, have you ever wondered what the difference a month can really make?  What’s that different this month over last month.

Well one thing that changed since last month is the number of supported versions of SQL Server in the world.  As of April 9th, 2013, extended support for SQL Server 2000 has expired.  What this means for anyone still running SQL Server 2000 is you’ll no longer be able to rely on Microsoft for support of the platform.  The piece that will affect most still using SQL Server 2000 is the slow decline in online resources for SQL Server 2000.  Knowledge Base and Books On Line are still available, but in the next 12 months those resources will be gone.

Oh… my… gawd… panic about SQL Server 2000, if you are still running it, right?  No, not exactly.  If you are still running SQL Server 2000, you should approach the business owners for those databases and explain that support has ended and the risks associated with this change.  If you have a stable, no longer developed, platform that is using SQL Server 2000, does it really need a shiny upgrade?  Would an upgrade increase or decrease the stability risk to the platform.  On the other hand, if you have a application that is still under development or has numerous issues with stability, these are great candidates for upgrades.

Regardless of the version of SQL Server you are running, remember things change from month to month and you need to watch for these changes.  One great way to achieve this is through a monthly checklist.  If you don’t have your own, check out the SQL Server Monthly Checklist that I provide on this blog. It covers most everything that should be checked. If you see anything missing from that list, please leave a comment on this post.  And if there are good resources out there that should be included on the list – share those as well.

Checklist Updates

There are just a couple changes to the checklist since last month, these updates include:

• Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2
• Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2012 RTM

If you have time to take a look at it, the SQL Server 2012 Product Guide to see how you can use SQL Server in your environment.

SOMETHING MISSING?

Is there something missing in this checklist or with the pages that has been overlooked?  Any cool links that would aid in the review of your SQL Server environments?  If so, leave a comment below and I’ll take a look.

For those that follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL), you’ll know that throughout the day I tweet out some links of things I find interesting.  These tweets include “Reading” in the message and are items I’ve read over the past few days, usually after hours when sharing would be less than useful, and spaced out to avoid spamming.  The content of the links usually pertain to SQL Server, technology, and career topics; which I think others would find useful.

Most Popular Link

The most popular item tweeted out last week had nothing to do with SQL Server, but it is seriously cool.  I would really love to get my hands on one of the cameras for a night at SQL Karaoke… the video might actually be steady then.

Reading: “14 Bad Habits That Can Cost You Your Job” onforb.es/15wxJFq #career

— Jason Strate (@StrateSQL) May 1, 2013

Last week’s top 20 “Reading” Links

Along with the top link, here are the top twenty items relating to SQL Server, technology and careers that were sent out last week. Usually, I do a top ten, but I really like the items that were in the top twenty.

1. 14 Bad Habits That Can Cost You Your Job [47 clicks]
2. The Computer Backup Rule of Three [29 clicks]
3. How To Handle Uncomfortable Salary Discussions At Work [27 clicks]
4. Temporary Tables in Stored Procedures [27 clicks]
5. Are You Using SSIS Best Practices? [26 clicks]
6. Is BETWEEN faster than GTE and LTE? [26 clicks]
7. Using the SQL Server APP_NAME function to control stored procedure execution [23 clicks]
8. You spoke – we listened! Lab Exam 88-971 scoring delays removed! [20 clicks]
9. Exams 88-986 & 88-987 Pages Live on Microsoft Learning [20 clicks]
10. TFS vs SSIS project versioning [18 clicks]
11. Why We Write #1 – An Interview With Thomas LaRock [18 clicks]
12. 5 Factors to Making Memorable Presentations [17 clicks]
13. The 7 most interesting social media stats and what to learn from them [13 clicks]
14. Finding SQL Server Installs Using Powershell [12 clicks]
15. SQL Server Management: Compatibility Levels [12 clicks]
16. Quantifying the Cost of Compression [11 clicks]
17. Squishy Limits in SQL Server Express Edition [9 clicks]
18. Can Likability Get you to the Top at Work? [9 clicks]
19. SQL Server Backup to Cloud – Managing Interrupted backups [7 clicks]
20. Execution Plans in Azure SQL Database [5 clicks]

Got something you think I should read and share, leave a comment below.  Also, if you want to see all of the links that were tweeted out last week?  Then follow the links on my tumblr blog or subscribe to it’s RSS feed.

It seems that with the Disney purchase of Star Wars this past year that May the Fourth is coming on strong this year.  I wasn’t planning to write up anything, since it kind of felt like this year the holiday was getting plenty of exposure, but then I want to Amazon and found out there are some amazing book deals going on.

In fact, there are a whole slew of Star Wars novels that are selling at $1.99.  Dude, I’m filling up my kindle library with these deals.  So far, I’ve picked up the following books.  Take a look, you might want some of them as well.

• Tatooine Ghost: Star Wars
• A Forest Apart: Star Wars
• Heir to the Empire: Star Wars (The Thrawn Trilogy): Star Wars, Volume I
• Winner Lose All–A Lando Calrissian Tale: Star Wars
• Boba Fett: A Practical Man: Star Wars
• The Hive: Star Wars
• Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi Volume 1-Force Storm
• Star Wars: Darth Vader and the Lost Command
• Recovery: Star Wars (The New Jedi Order): Darth Maul
• Saboteur: Star Wars
• Darth Plagueis: Star Wars

I read Heir to the Empire: Star Wars a number of years back and enjoyed it. I don’t know what to expect out of the others but for a Star Wars fan and about $20, I think I can’t be too disappointed.

Welcome to this Friday’s reblog summary post.  The aim of these posts is to bring some old posts that newer readers may not have seen back to the forefront.  As with many technology blogs, just because a post is old, doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have value.

Some posts from years gone by that you may have missed are:

• Find Query Plans That May Utilize Parallelism (27 Apr, 2009)
• Analyze This – Analyze Your Indexes – Part 5 (28 Apr, 2009)
• Analyze This – Analyze Your Indexes – Part 6 (28 Apr, 2009)
• Changing A Performance Counter Log Format (2 May, 2010)
• Meme Monday – “I got 99 problems but a disk ain’t one” (2 May, 2011)

Do you have something from years gone by that was posted during this week?  If so, leave a comment below and we’ll give some new life to good knowledge.

For those that follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL), you’ll know that throughout the day I tweet out some links of things I find interesting.  These tweets include “Reading” in the message and are items I’ve read over the past few days, usually after hours when sharing would be less than useful, and spaced out to avoid spamming.  The content of the links usually pertain to SQL Server, technology, and career topics; which I think others would find useful.

Most Popular Link

The most popular item tweeted out last week had nothing to do with SQL Server, but it is seriously cool.  I would really love to get my hands on one of the cameras for a night at SQL Karaoke… the video might actually be steady then.

Reading: “How To Figure Out What You Really Should Be Paid” onforb.es/V4q7jG #career

— Jason Strate (@StrateSQL) April 23, 2013

Last week’s top 20 “Reading” Links

Along with the top link, here are the top twenty items relating to SQL Server, technology and careers that were sent out last week. Usually, I do a top ten, but I really like the items that were in the top twenty.

1. How To Figure Out What You Really Should Be Paid [35 clicks]
2. How Facebook knew a man was gay before he came out [34 clicks]
3. The End of SQLRally in the US [32 clicks]
4. Upgrading To SQL 2012: Ten Things You Don’t Want To Miss [24 clicks]
5. How to Refresh Your Mood: 4 Simple Tips [19 clicks]
6. AlwaysOn Availability Groups: Read-only Routing [19 clicks]
7. get your hands dirty with SQL Server 2012 SP1 [18 clicks]
8. I lost over 15 pounds (7 kilo) and so can you – thanks to #Azure and #Surface [17 clicks]
9. How to go the Summit [17 clicks]
10. Pick a Needle and Move It [14 clicks]
11. Treat Criticism Like Spam Email [14 clicks]
12. Texas Court Confirms You Can’t Patent Math | Electronic Frontier Foundation [13 clicks]
13. Good Employees Make Mistakes. Great Leaders Allow Them To. [13 clicks]
14. #Windows #Azure Community Event [12 clicks]
15. Introducing our latest SQL Server 2008 Microsoft Certified Master – Ben Miller [11 clicks]
16. Checking Out Amazon Redshift [8 clicks]
17. Filegroups and Non-Clustered Indexes [8 clicks]
18. Whiteboard Wednesday #2: Choosing the Right Reporting Tool [7 clicks]
19. Security: People Are the Weakest Link [5 clicks]
20. Restrict Access to Containers and Blobs [3 clicks]

Other Stuff Shared

Of course, no week would be complete without a few off-topic links.  These have nothing to do with technology or your career, but they sure are entertaining and interesting (and a couple are pretty gross).

1. The amazing pencil art of Diego Fazio [16 clicks]
2. Love Is A Battlefield: Literal Video Version [9 clicks]

Got something you think I should read and share, leave a comment below.  Also, if you want to see all of the links that were tweeted out last week?  Then follow the links on my tumblr blog or subscribe to it’s RSS feed.