Author: way0utwest

All the Denver area groups are having their meetings this week. If you’re in the area, try to attend a meeting. You’ll meet some great people and learn a few things.

• Boulder SQL Server User Group – Tuesday night, Sept 15, 2009, Level 3 in Broomfield. A discussion on SQL Server Clustering.
• Colorado Springs – Wednesday, Sept 16, 2009 – Consortio services office – Tuning By Janis Griffin of Confio
• Denver SQL Server Group – Thursday, Sept 17, 2009 – Ameritech, Denver Tech Center –
• SSRS 2008 R2 – What’s New So Far By Steve Wake of Visa and SQL Tuning By Janis Griffin of Confio

I won’t make any meetings this month with a busy home schedule, but I’ll try to get back to one of them next month.

I saw a post recently that asked about backing up the Resource database. The person said they just realized that it wasn’t included in their backup scheme and was worried.\

Don’t worry, you don’t need to back it up.

The page at MSDN describes the Resource database as essentially a large lookup table(s) for the SQL Server itself. It can find the system objects that are used: tables, views, DMVs, DMFs, etc. When the server is upgraded, a new copy of the Resource database is copied over. The objects don’t have to be built from scripts with DROPs and CREATEs.

This means, however, that each time you patch your server, you potentially could be copying over a new version here if some system object changes. That means that you don’t really want to back up this database.

If you are restoring to a new server, when you install that server, it will have the correct copy of the Resource database for your system. If you were to copy over an incorrect version, the system objects might not match up with the system code in the SQL Server executables and DLLs. That would be bad.

I haven’t seen notes about the Resource database becoming corrupted, but it could. In that case, I’d suggest you copy the files from another SQL Server of the same version, or install SQL to another machine, patch it up, and then copy the files to your damaged installation. That could be a problem, but it does mean one other thing.

You ought to be tracking your SQL Server version and build on a regular basis as part of your monitoring.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. – Albert Einstein

from 37 signals blog.

Today is the anniversary of one of the worst attacks in the US, the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. I wanted to pause my blog to remember the people who lost their lives that day, many of whom were innocent workers in downtown New York City.

I still remember that day visibly. I had family in town, it was the morning after the the Bronco game in Mile High Stadium where Ed McCaffrey broke his leg. I watched that game, went to bed, woke up the next morning and turned on the TV. This was the day that Michael Jordan was going to announce if we was returning to basketball. ESPN, however, was showing the World Trade Center instead of anything else.

My normal routine was to stretch in the morning, watch some TV, and then ride my bike 9 miles to work. I did that and found the entire office glued to a TV in the conference room. I arrived in time to see the second tower get hit by a plane. I still get chills thinking about that, especially as I spent a couple days on the 80th floor in Tower 2 working with a business partner in 2000. My heart went out to the many people I’d met, and talked with over months the previous year.

No work got done, and after watching the towers collapse, we went home with heavy hearts. I had family in town, and my sisters-in-law were terrified of flying home in a few days. They weren’t even sure they’d be able to go home.

I don’t know exactly what happened, who’s to blame, or even how I feel about the events since. But I know many people died that day, too early in their lives, and the pain continues for the many more they left behind.

Take a moment of silence today and remember those people.