sql server | KC's Blog

Document SQL Server with Database Note Taker

Kent Chen — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 20:30:38 +0000

Database Note Taker is a free note-taking app made specifically for SQL databases. It makes a database schema and structures a lot easier to capture and document, and definitely simplifies the database documentation and takes the guesswork out of everyday development with databases.

How does it work?

More specifically,

Connect to your database.
Refresh with the current structure of your database.
Database Note Taker shows where documentation is missing.
Add and edit notes for tables, columns, stored procedures and so on.
Publish and distribute the documentation.
When your database has changed, refresh and add new notes.

Features

Here are a few features worth mentioning:

Separate documentation
Work offline – a live database connection is only required to refresh the database.
Publish to HTML
Database platform independent
Source control friendly
Search
Multiple developers friendly
History tracking
etc.

Not enough and looking for more database documentation options? Check out this list compiled by SQLShark.

The post Document SQL Server with Database Note Taker first appeared on KC's Blog.

Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2017-06)

Kent Chen — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 17:19:23 +0000

Need a huge SQL database for your data project? Here is one for you.

Nick Craver and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump. Then, Brent Ozar took the data and imported into SQL Server for his teaching performance tuning needs, and generously published it via a 16GB torrent feed.

Once downloaded, it gives you a series of 7Zip files that you can extract to produce an 118GB SQL Server 2008 database that you can attach directly to any 2008-2016 SQL Server.

It’s a pretty big database containing massive data that is perfect for your data analysis projects.

Badges – 23M rows, 1.1GB data
Comments – 58.2M rows, 18.5GB data
Posts – 36.1M rows, 90GB data, 15.5GB off which is off-row text data. This table holds questions & answers, so the Body NVARCHAR(MAX) field can get pretty big.
PostLinks – 4.2M rows, 0.1GB
Users – 7.3M rows, 1GB
Votes – 128.4M rows, 4.5GB

/via Brent Ozar/

The post Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2017-06) first appeared on KC's Blog.

What Version and Edition of SQL Server I am Running on the Server

Kent Chen — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:34:52 +0000

There are a few ways available to find out what version and edition of SQL Server you are running.

SQL Server Management Studio

Connect to the server you want to find out, right-click the server instance name and choose Properties.

The product line tells what edition of SQL Server this is. It runs SQL Express version in this case.

The version line tells the version of SQL Server you are running. According to this Microsoft document, it runs SQL Server 2016.

Here is a quick glimpse of what these version numbers are referring to:

SQL Server 2016 SP1 - 13.0.4001.0 (recent service pack) / 13.0.4435.0 (latest cumulative update - May 2017)
SQL Server 2014 SP2 - 12.0.5546.0 (recent service pack) / 12.0.5546.0 (latest cumulative update - April 2017)
SQL Server 2012 SP3 - 11.0.6020.0 (recent service pack) / 11.0.6598.0 (latest cumulative update - May 2017)
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP3 - 10.50.6000.34 (recent service pack)

Command line

Open a command prompt window and type:

sqlcmd -S servername\instancename

Note that the switch -S needs to be capital to connect to a remote server.

Then type

select @@version
go

It’s pretty clear that it’s a SQL Server 2016 Express I am running on this computer.

SQL Server Installation Center

Search and launch SQL Server Installation Center on the SQL Server you are checking, go to Tools and click Installed SQL Server features discovery report option.

The report will be opened in your default web browser in a moment, like below:

The post What Version and Edition of SQL Server I am Running on the Server first appeared on KC's Blog.

17 Free Database Tools for Every DBA

Kent Chen — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 06:40:23 +0000

Brought to you by Idera, here are 17 free SQL database solution tools to improve your everyday database operations, ranging from Monitoring & Performance, Backup & Administration, to Security & compliance.

Here is the full list below:

Monitoring & Performance

Backup & Administration

Security & Compliance

Bonus – Infrastructure Performance Tools

The post 17 Free Database Tools for Every DBA first appeared on KC's Blog.

Connecting to SQL Server via Management Studio

Kent Chen — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:11:01 +0000

I just can’t remember how many times I’ve seen this same error popping out to me when I was trying to connect to a new SQL server. And every time when I see this I had to dig into my mind figuring out what to do to solve this. So it’s time to jog down the notes for the next time. My brain just sucks when trying to remember stuff like this.

1. Enable TCP/IP protocols from SQL Server Configuration Manager. Make sure to restart the SQL server after the change.

2. Turn on Port 1433, or whatever the number you set on the server, on Firewall.

3. If the target server is a named instance, such as server\instance, the service SQL Server Browse needs to start. And a UDP port 1434 needs to be turned on on Firewall.

If still no luck, go through this checklist to see what’s missed.

The post Connecting to SQL Server via Management Studio first appeared on KC's Blog.