FUblog

Moving On

Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As you can see, there's not much activity here anymore. You can find more of Nat's wisdom at webapper. Erik is now blogging at psykel. Happy Trails, grumps

appending an ntext field

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 14:50:00 -0400

Say you want to do something like this: update table set ntextThing = ntextThing + '!' where id = 1 That's not going to work. This does, though:


DECLARE @ptrval binary(16)
SELECT @ptrval = TEXTPTR(ntextThing) 
FROM item 
WHERE id =1
UPDATETEXT table.ntextthing @ptrval NULL 0 '!'
GO

Exporting DTS Packages

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 12:43:00 -0400

When you backup and restore an MSSQL database, or use DTS to move schema and/or data between servers, you won't get the DTS packages that apply to that database. But what if your application relies on those DTS packages? You're gonna need to DTS the DTS packages. And here's how you do it. [More]

dbcc checkdb

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 12:47:00 -0400

Got this error logged for a DB I had just restored:

[Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver][SQLServer]Could not find the index entry for RID '3601000000040000006e0800000000000005000001002200323030352d30392d3239' in index page (1:1485), index ID 0, database 'commonspot-health'

Hunted around, came up with this:

EXEC sp_dboption 'commonspot-health', 'single user', 'TRUE'
dbcc checkdb ('commonspot-health',REPAIR_REBUILD)
EXEC sp_dboption 'commonspot-health', 'single user', 'FALSE'

DBCC is my friend.

Scheduled DTS Package won't run

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:57:00 -0400

If you've got a scheduled DTS Package that won't run, it's probably a simple fix. The error we got was "reason: the system cannot find the file specified." The job would run just fine when manually started, but scheduled jobs would fail. The reason is irritating -- SQL Server doesn't include the path to "DTSRun.exe" So you'll need to add that path to your PATH environmental variable, or edit each job you create individually. To edit the job, go the the STEPS tab, double click the Step, and manually edit the command that calles DTSRun. You'll find DTSRun.exe in tools/binn.

Firehose mode in SQL Server

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 10:04:00 -0400

I saw this super odd error message from SQL Server today:

Transaction cannot start while in firehose mode

Firehose mode? What's that? [More]

yukon aka mssql 2005

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:22:00 -0400

A Community Technology Preview of MSSQL 2005 is out, a free, no registration download from ms.com. I ran it as an upgrade to MSSQL 2000. Speaking of MS, have you checked out the Action Pack subscription? We get it at Fusium and if you've never seen the deal before, you'll prolly poop your pants. Check it.

killing processes in mssql via script

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:15:00 -0400

While working on TBJ, I had a LOT of open database connections at any time. Now sure, I *DO* close my connections, but there's a lot of db communication going on, and Tomcat has some kind of connection pooling such that it puts connections to sleep when it's done with them, but they're still there! Now the problem comes when I needed to restore a database on top of the existing database. MSSQL doesn't like you to do that unless all the open processes are killed. Normally I just rt-click kill process each one, since there are only a couple. But oh my god, I had about a hundred. F that. Enter Google. [More]