Monthly Archives: April 2010

PASS European Conference

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PASS European Conference is taking place this week, between April 21-23 at Neuss, Germany. This conference is one of the largest gathering of top Microsoft Experts, MVPs, BI Experts taking part in this 3 day conference. What makes this conference more special is, Microsoft is conducting a full-day Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event on April 21 followed by PASS European Conference on 22nd and 23rd April. There are more than 45 Technical Sessions on SQL Server and Microsoft BI from the subject experts.

I am not going for the event (though I really wanted to attend), I would following the events happening thru SQLPASS website, twitter and other social networking channels.  For those readers who do not want to really miss this opportunity, it is not too late (may be if you are outside Europe). Register for the conference here http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Registration.aspx

–Bru Medishetty

Meeting Pete Sampras is a dream come true !

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Last weekend I traveled to Atlantic City, NJ to watch Pete Sampras playing an exhibition match. I was very much excited and was looking forward to watch Pete live for the first time in my life. Never before had I watched a Tennis match featuring Pete Sampras live in a Stadium, I was very happy that my dream of watching the Great Champion is going to be a reality.

The match was on Saturday evening and was eagerly waiting for that occasion. I had no idea that Pete was making an appearance for fans at 12:30 noon that day at the tennis village. I was passing by the tennis village and saw on display that Pete was there between 12:30 and 1:00 PM. Thinking that I missed a once in a life time opportunity to meet Pete, I was going  to shopping center and in the middle of nowhere I saw Pete Sampras coming in the opposite direction. I could not believe my luck and without wasting a moment went to him greeted and spoke for a couple of minutes, took his autograph on his autobiography – A Champion’s Mind (Picture 3rd in this blog). It has been my dream for nearly 20 years to meet Pistol Pete and finally that became true on that afternoon of April 10th 2010 at 1:26 PM.

You can see how much excited I was when I met him in this picture.

That was Pete talking to me.

Pete’s Autobiography A Champion’s Mind signed by him on that day.

One more souvenir from Atlantic City, this one too signed by Pete when I met him in person.

Later that evening, I watched all the matches and enjoyed every moment of it. I recorded few minutes of the match between Sampras and Safin watch it below.

YouTube Preview Image

Had it not been my brother, who informed me that Pete Sampras is visiting Atlantic City, NJ and arranged my trip, I would have missed the opportunity of meeting my favorite Tennis Star.

–Bru Medishetty

Find Databases without recent full backups

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One of the important tasks a SQL Server DBA does is database backup. While maintaining the backups of the important database is important, the need to monitor that the exists a valid Full backups for the databases is equally important. This blog will try to explain how to find the list of databases which do not have a Full backup in the recent few days. (8 days in this example). You can obviously change the value in DATEADD function to suit your choice for # of days to look for.

The code used in this example is found at the end of this blog.

First, I run the script to find the list of databases which do not have a full backup. The very first statement you see in the script (SELECT @@VERSION ) is not required, I included it my example to show the SQL Server Version on which I am executing these scripts. The reason for including it is, a slight change in the script. In SQL Server 2005 and 2008, I am querying sys.databases and in SQL Server 2000 it does not exist, so I would need to use master..sysdatabases.

The query returns list of the databases on my instance which do not have a full backup in the last 8 days.

I then perform a backup of Adventureworks database, which is one of the database missing a full backup. the picture below is the script I run to create a backup of Adventureworks DB.

The next thing I do is run the same script that was run at the beginning to find out the databases without full backups and this time displays only the database Snapshot_Source.

The following is the script that works for SQL Server 2000. Note there is no database missing full backups, indicating I have at least full backup of all databases on that server.. Based on the importance of the data in the databases, other backups types have to be configured and monitored. However, a full database backup would always be the base of any database recovery process and should be as recent as possible to avoid delays in recovery process.

Script used in this example…

SELECT @@VERSION AS [SQL SERVER VERSION]

SELECT NAME FROM sys.databases
WHERE NAME != 'TEMPDB'
AND NAME NOT IN (    SELECT DISTINCT database_name FROM msdb..backupset
WHERE backup_start_date > DATEADD(DAY,-8,GETDATE())
AND  TYPE = 'D' )

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–Bru Medishetty