Andy M Mallon - AM² - Page 2 of 26 - Databases & Diversity

How do I prevent a trigger from firing for one process?

March 8, 2022 Andy 7

I recently saw a question on DBA Stack Exchange (it has since been deleted by the author), who had a “special process” that ran regularly, and as part of that process, they disabled the trigger, did some stuff, and re-enabled it. During that process, the … [Read More]

How to await the execution of the rds_backup_database stored procedure?

March 3, 2022 Andy 0

Question Our team is migrating one of our databases to Amazon RDS MS SQL Server. As part of that, we have to rewrite some of our stored procedures. We have a stored procedure that performs a database backup to a network storage. The above stored … [Read More]

How to change the web browser used by SSMS when you hit Ctrl+Alt+R

February 15, 2022 Andy 0

Question When I am running: Ctrl+Alt+R will run the web browser in an SSMS tab. However, this now produces the message: I do have MS Edge installed but SSMS is not finding it. What should I do to help SSMS find MS Edge and use … [Read More]

Add default rows to the query result if restrictions are not met

February 10, 2022 Andy 0

Question I have a SQL query that looks for values in a table on a range of dates. If no record is found, I would like to generate rows with default values. Example of one of the table existing records: DeviceId Time Context Value 1 … [Read More]

Querying SERVERPROPERTY() and DATABASEPROPERTYEX() from a view (without knowing magic)

December 17, 2021 Andy 1

I’m not going to beat around the bush. I hate the SERVERPROPERTY() and DATABASEPROPERTYEX() system functions. Loathing The thing I hate the most about these two functions is that you need to know the right magic spells to make them work. Let’s look at SERVERPROPERTY() … [Read More]

SQL Server service – Not Starting With Automatic Startup, “The system cannot find the file specified”, but starts fine manually

October 29, 2021 Andy 0

Question This is a weird one, and I’ve run out of ideas for how to go about troubleshooting this. Here’s the issue, best as I can sum it up. The SQL Server engine and Agent services are not started when the server first boots when … [Read More]

Are Basic Availability Groups a reliable HA solution without integrity checks on the secondary replica?

October 26, 2021 Andy 0

Question We have a few Basic Availability groups in production and I’ve been reading about the limitations of them. I’m concerned about the following limitations: No backups on secondary replica. No integrity checks on secondary replicas. Suppose that we haven’t failed over in months. In … [Read More]

Why are there no “Daylight Time” time zones in SQL Server?

October 21, 2021 Andy 0

Question I am converting the times of some datetimeoffset columns from UTC to Eastern. I am doing this via the command This seemed to be working correctly (times were shifted 4 hours earlier and now have a -04:00 offset, exactly what I wanted), but then … [Read More]

What the heck is the SSISDB? Where does it come from?

October 18, 2021 Andy 2

Back in my day, we stored SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages in msdb, or the file system. Well, I’m neither dead nor retired, so that’s not an accurate statement–today is still “my time.” But when I was learning about SQL Server, those were the … [Read More]

How do I put the result of stored procedure in a new column in a view?

October 17, 2021 Andy 0

Question I have created a stored procedure which takes as inputs a schema name and a table name and outputs an INT containing the largest value in the id column of the table. I have also created a view containing all the schema names, table … [Read More]