posts

In the Data Mart, or the Data Warehouse world, there is a date dimension table in all schemas if you are using the Kimball Dimensional Modeling...

So you’re a DBA and your manager comes in and says that the BI team wants to install and configure an instance of Analysis Service. Oh and by the...

Tinker, Tailor, Developer, DBA is not intended as a pitch on a slightly less harrowing book or movie than the John Le Carre classic.  ...

Have you ever been surprised by suddenly finding out that one of your databases has grown way beyond your expectations? Hopefully, this isn’t a...

In previous blog posts I have explored the relevance of the DBA position itself in business  and the unique ways that SQL Server DBAs tend to...

All PowerShell versions You can use ping.exe just like any other command inside PowerShell scripts. By adding “-4” to the command line,...

An often overlooked feature in PowerShell is the ability to make a function parameter both optional and mandatory - at the same time. Let's for...

When you use Windows Forms dialogs and windows, you may have noticed that they show differently, depending on whether you launched your script from...

Verifying a Local User Account Here is a snippet that verifies a local user account. Simply submit a username and a password. You get back either...

Get-ChildItem supports basic wildcards, but it does not support the rich feature set of regular expressions. If you combine Get-ChildItem with...

WMI represents all kinds of physical and logical entities on your machine. It also has classes that represent user accounts which include both local...

By default, SQL Server databases are comprised of two files: the primary data file (or .mdf) and the log file (or .ldf). It is, however, possible to...

I’ve worked on a project that used XML heavily inside SQL Server. We really utilized SQL Server’s XML support almost to the full extent,...