Author Archives: admin_sqlgrinder

Truth About Working with Tech Recruiting Agencies

The job of tech hiring has been almost completely outsourced and working with recruiting agencies has become a necessity. Recruiting agencies can be either a bridge or another hurdle between you and the job you want. If your target market … Continue reading

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SSMS Best Practices and the Dark Theme

Our tools can make us more efficient and productive – if we take the time to learn their secrets. I spend a lot of time in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and have learned valuable tips and features along the way from many others (links provided). SSMS … Continue reading

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Mystery of the Changing CASE WHEN Output and Data Type Precedence

I was working on a T-SQL query that had some very particular output requirements for decimal places. The problem seemed fairly easy, but when I tried to form a CASE WHEN statement that produced slightly different decimal lengths for each … Continue reading

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Several Habits of a Highly Effective Troubleshooter

As a follow up to my article Anatomy of a Successful Troubleshooter, I began thinking about the habits that I have found effective when troubleshooting. I was trying to coach a teammate with troubleshooting and put together this catalog of what I have … Continue reading

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Anatomy of a Successful Troubleshooter

I recently found myself coaching a teammate with troubleshooting advice, but it seemed like no matter what I offered they were unable to improve their situation or correct bad habits. It seemed like it just wasn’t in their DNA. So, … Continue reading

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Zero-Cost Highly Available Reporting Services within a Failover Cluster

This solution is for anyone that has a SQL failover cluster and wishes Reporting Service to be highly available and have failover capabilities. The solution I implemented seems the most natural and how Reporting Services should work right out of the box – but … Continue reading

Posted in Failover Cluster, SQL 2008, SQL 2012, SSRS | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Accessing Multiple Cluster Instances without Instance Names

Since I was installing a dual instance cluster, I had setup two virtual SQL database names with different IP address and the second instance required a non-default instance name. However, I wanted to access both instances using the virtual name … Continue reading

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SQL Setup Checklist – Because SQL Defaults Suck!

When installing SQL, it is too easy to click next and accept all the default settings. Kevin Boles has preached for years that SQL Server defaults suck! Joseph D’Antoni has also addressed bad default settings in Building Perfect SQL Servers … Continue reading

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Gotchas: Installing SQL 2008R2 on Windows Server 2012R2 Cluster

I was building a new cluster with a dual instance of SQL 2012 and SQL 2008R2. Everything went easy with the SQL 2012 but not so well with the SQL 2008R2 install. As many have found out installing SQL 2008R2 … Continue reading

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