I know this has nothing to do with SQL Server, but I wanted to put it out ther and hope it helps someone, somewhere.

If you are like me and you disabled the UAC prompts when you installed Vista, and then you try to add a network printer (in my case the printer was connected to an XP desktop) you get a "Print Monitor Unknown" error.  The way to get around this is to re-enable the UAC, then you will get a prompt for the drivers, and then they install.  Viola!

Hope this helps!

Reed

Apparently I am the first person on the Internet to need to do this, which I find hard to believe, but I couldn’t find anything about this, so I had to make a solution myself.  The problem I was trying to solve was this:  I have a table with a column, and I want to search that column for keywords. 

No problem, that’s what Full Text Indexes do.  However, I didn’t want to just search for one static word, or a list of static words.  I wanted to search for a list of keywords that I was storing in a column in a different table.

I could not find any way to dynamically pass a to a Full Text Query results from another query, which would have been really easy.   Instead, I had to create a list, enclosed in double quotes (“”) and separated by commas (,) from my table containing my keyword list.  I made this list into a variable and then passed that variable to the “CONTAINS” query I wrote.  Viola!  It worked. 

This is the sample code I used:

DECLARE @TermList varchar(100)

SELECT @TermList = COALESCE(@TermList + '", ', '') + '"' +

 term

FROM dbo.term

select * from dbo.calls where

FREETEXT ([Subject],@TermList)

Where @TermList  is the variable I created to hold my list of terms, the “term” column in dbo.term is the column containing all my keywords, and the dbo.calls table has the “subject” column that I want to look in to find matches.

Hope this helps somebody!

Reed

There is a lot of confusion around SSIS and how and when you can execute packages, so hopefully I can help clear this up.

If you just have the SQL Server management tools on your desktop (Management Studio and Business Intelligence Development Studio aka. BIDS) then you can build a package in BIDS and run it there, but you can’t deploy to your local machine and execute there.  You need SSIS installed on a machine to execute a package.

That doesn’t mean you can’t call SSIS packages from a job server that doesn’t have SQL Server on it, however.

In order to do this you need to put your SSIS package into a job on the SQL Server box.  You don't have to schedule the job, you just need to create a job step that will execute your package.

Once that is done, we can call that job from any machine.  We don't need the SSIS components in order to do this.

The code I tested goes as follows.  I created a query to kick off my job and saved it in text file called query.txt - the query looks like this:

USE MSDB

GO

EXEC sp_start_job @job_name = 'TestPlan', @server_name = 'Pashllfixit\SS2K5'

GO

Then I wrote a little command to call osql.exe on the SQL Server and execute the command.  I can run this from any cmd.exe on any server: 

"\\pashllfixit\c$\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\osql.exe" -E -Spashllfixit\ss2k5 -iC:\query.txt

And it will execute my SSIS package and we are done.

This will allow you to use SSIS without installing any SQL Server components on your job server. 

Hope this helps!

-Reed

If you are having trouble performance tuning SQL Server 2000, there is one whitepaper you need.  It’s called “SQL Performance Tuning using Waits and Queues” and it’s written by Tom Davidson.  It takes the guesswork and voodoo out of tuning. 

The way it work is you run a stored procedure (it’s in the whitepaper) and it finds out what SQL Server is waiting on, which gives you a feel for where you need to focus your efforts to tune SQL Server.

I highly recommend reading this paper and using it to help if you are having performance problems with SQL Server 2000.

For an awesome example of how this would work, check out the SQLCAT blog here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/archive/2005/09/05/461199.aspx.

You can find the script itself in this presentation:  http://www.sqldev.net/events.htm#SQL_Connections_12-15_October_2003,_Palm_Springs_CA_ ( it’s this one:  SPR201 - 4 - Performance Tuning - Using Waits & Queues.zip)

And the table to help you determine what to do is here:  http://www.sqlmag.com/Files/09/40925/Webtable_01.doc

The whole thing joined together is available from SQL Server Magazine, but you need a subscription to access it.

-Reed

If you are not a SharePoint Admin (I am not) but need to interact with MOSS 2007 and SSIS, this guide should walk you through the basics.

First, and this is the most important part,  you must enable a service on the Windows Server 2003 box.   The service is WebClient – enable it, then set it to autostart.

Now, Open up SharePoint and Navigate to your Document Library – I am using the MOSS 2007 VPC so mine is: http://moss.litwareinc.com/SiteDirectory/EDTDocs/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx.

Now you have 2 choices, you can map a drive (  net use * "\\moss.litwareinc.com\SiteDirectory\EDTDocs\Shared Documents" will do the trick for that.)  Or you can address it as a UNC Path like this:   \\moss.litwareinc.com\SiteDirectory\EDTDocs\Shared Documents.

Now, when you have a file destination in SSIS you can make it your mapped drive or the UNC path.

I hope this helps someone; it took me days to get this right.