Lori Brown, Author at SQLRx

About the Author

Lori is an avid SQL enthusiast and general nerd and coffee nut. She has been working for SQLRX for 19 years and has been working with SQL in general for 27 years. Yup...she is an old hand at this stuff.

Oct 14

Find All Databases with Less Than 20 Percent Free Space and Grow Them

By Lori Brown | Function , Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server

This is kind of a continuation of one of my previous posts. (https://www.sqlrx.com/find-and-modify-file-growth-settings-for-all-databases/ ) Thousands of databases in a SQL instance can make a DBA’s life a bit challenging. Automation suddenly becomes very important. My new client had been shrinking their databases frequently, mistakenly thinking that doing so was a good thing. I needed to […]

Sep 30

Find and Modify File Growth Settings for All Databases

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server

I have a client who is challenging me in a lot of ways. They have over a thousand databases in one of their 2 SQL instances. Over. A. Thousand. Admittedly, the databases are not big but the sheer quantity of them is daunting to say the least. To make it more fun, some of the […]

Sep 23

We’re Baaaaaack!!!

By Lori Brown | SQLRX

If you have visited us within the past year, you may have noticed that we have been pretty quiet on our blog and may have wondered what happened. Well…..we had some technical difficulties (our syntax highlighter plugin stopped working), then we got super busy, then came the holidays, then came COVID. I know, Excuses…Excuses….Excuses. Well, […]

Aug 29

Backup and Restore Databases with CHECKSUM and VERIFYONLY

By Lori Brown | Backup and Restore , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server

I found out that I have been missing something from our regular database backups that I had no idea that I should have been using all along. I know about verifying your backup file and have incorporated into our standard maintenance routines one that will periodically test backups by restoring using VERIFYONLY. However, I totally […]

May 31

Use DDL Triggers to get Instance and Database Change Notifications

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server

I have been working on some improvements to some of the regular ways we monitor for important changes. We always have to be on the lookout for unexpected changes being made in the SQL instances that we monitor since often times we are not the only team who has sysadmin access to the instance. We […]

Apr 18

And Now a Couple of Job Queries

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Jobs , SQL Administration , SQL Server

Hooray!! We finally have our 70-764 and 70-765 certification exams done and can turn our attention back to blogging more regularly. Those exams were pretty tough mostly because there was a lot of information that had to be memorized since there are always aspects of SQL that we don’t regularly use and there is no […]

Oct 18

Find Out Which Databases Have Multiple Files

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Miscellaneous , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server

This might be kind of basic but since I am working on a comprehensive script to discover things that a DBA really needs to know about, I made a couple of queries that will produce a list of the databases that have multiple files along with the locations of the physical files. One query finds […]

Oct 04

Failed In-Place Upgrade – Missing Backup Directory

By Lori Brown | Installation , SQL Administration , SQL Server , Upgrade

I was recently performing an in-place upgrade of SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2014 on one of my client’s servers. I have done a ton of successful and uneventful in-place upgrades and was surprised when the upgrade failed with the error message: “Failed to create a new folder ‘X:\SQLBackups’. The specified path is invalid (for […]

Sep 14

Finding Table Defaults, Primary and Unique Keys and Foreign Keys with sp_helpconstraint

By Lori Brown | Dependencies , Object Information , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server

A little while back I wrote a post going over sp_help in a beginning effort to find table dependency information. https://www.sqlrx.com/using-sp_help-to-find-object-dependencies/. That expanded to reviewing sys.dm_sql_referenced_entities & sys.dm_sql_referenced_entities (https://www.sqlrx.com/finding_things_sql_that_reference_a_table/ & https://www.sqlrx.com/how-to-find-the-objects-and-columns-a-stored-procedure-or-view-uses/ ) and sys.sql_expression_dependencies (https://www.sqlrx.com/using-sys-sql_expression_dependencies-as-a-single-source-to-find-referenced-and-referencing-objects/ ) Now I want to loop back just a bit and expand on more information that is found in sp_help […]

« Previous 1 2 3 4 … 10 Next »

All Posts by Lori Brown

About the Author