Grant Fritchey took it upon himself to tag me in his most recent blog post abouthow we use SQL Server. The best part about this is I was just hired Senior DBA, so I can write with the unbridled enthusiasm of someone who is showing off a new car. Here’s a little bit of background – my employer provides freight, utility, and telecom expense management services. In short, we pay your bills, we hand key your bills, we figure out how to EDI your bills – we do everything we can to process as many bills as possible every second of every day of the year.

I put out a call a while back for a list of SQL Server presenters who are on twitter. A fair number of people responded. I kept it quiet because I was busy doing my day job, but I was secretly plotting… Plotting to put this list together and share it worth the world! (evil laughter) Not only did I put this list on my blog, I also put it on twitter.

Bonus link dump week! Since I haven’t done one of these in several weeks, some of these links go all the way back to October 29th, enjoy. SQL SERVER Suggested Max Memory Settings for SQL Server 2005/2008 – Windows Live – Ever wonder how to set up the max memory settings for SQL Server? On our production instances we use fixed settings, but I’m going to revisit those settings now that I’m armed with this information.

So, you though that GUIDs were supposed to be unique, eh? You aren’t alone. A lot of people assume that GUIDs are unique. Hell, unique is in the name! On Friday, I had a bug report filed about a UNIQUE constraint violation. Seeing as how I had bigger fish to fry, and this functionality is only rarely used, I put it aside until this morning when I took a closer look at the bug report and the code in question.

OR HOW TO GET YOURSELF ADOPTED FROM THE ANIMAL SHELTER A Trip to the Humane Society Way back in 2001, I took a trip to the local humane society. Ostensibly, I was going there with my girlfriend at the time to look at kittens. We were resolved about not getting a cat that day. This story wouldn’t be interesting if we didn’t get a cat, so I’ll spoil the ending for you and let you know that we did take a cat home that day.

The PASS Summit just wrapped up and I’m riding a giant wave of excitement about the entire organization, not just the summit. I met so many great people over the last week who were excited to be a part of PASS. On top of that, there were even more people who asked how they could get involved in PASS. Locally You can start off by volunteering locally. This is probably the easiest way to get involved with the organization.

These are a day late. Sorry about that. It’s been one helluva week. Also, November 1st marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. So, if you’ve had a story inside you waiting to get out, wait no further! SQL Server Find the complete call tree for a stored procedure – Linchi Shea shares a perl script that will attempt to determine the full call stack of a single stored procedure.

I came across a lot of great links in the last week. So many that I had to cut about 40% of them to make this list. As always, you can check out the firehose at my delicious bookmarks page. SQL Server CSS SQL Server Engineers : SQL Server Urban Legends Discussed – Common SQL Server myths discussed and dispelled by premier support services. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) – Best Practices – Part 1 – Getting started in SSIS is hard enough.

SQL Server 2008 (and 2005) contain five special databases: master, model, tempdb, msdb, and mssqlsystemresource (aka Resource). These databases are used by SQL Server for its own maintenance and management. master The master database contains all of the system level information for SQL Server – all of the logins, linked servers, endpoints, and other system-wide configuration settings. The master database is also where SQL Server stores information about the other databases on this instance and the location of their files.

SQL Server Less Than Dot – Blog – How to Monitor Database Mirroring – Monitoring database mirroring is more than just running scripts to email you ever X minutes. Paul Theriault shows how to monitor mirroring (and other aspects of performance) using alerts. How to get the whole group of duplicate rows – CTEs are great for more than just replacing views. Mladen Prajdic shows how they can be used to find duplicate data quickly and efficiently.