How to create a SQL Snippet

In SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Microsoft introduced “snippets”. These are shortcuts to commonly used pieces of code that can be inserted in the query window (a similar facility for SQL 2008 was available with the free SSMSTools Pack but the developer now charges for the 2012 version). When you right click on the window a menu similar to an Intellisense shortcut menu pops up where you can choose some pre-cooked pieces of TSQL to insert. The good news is that it is possible to create your own snippets that appear as a menu option of My Code Snippets. The bad news is from Microsoft’s site on the subject you have to learn yet another xml schema to create one.

Click to enlarge

But wait, there’s more good news… some kind soul has created a nifty little tool that will do all the hard work for us, Snippets Generator. All you have to do is copy your code in to the main window, fill in the name, author and description fields, click Generate Snippet and it saves the file in your code snippets folder.

Click to enlarge

Next time you right-click in the query window and choose Insert Snippet –> My Code Snippet

Comments

Fun and games with the Management Data Warehouse (MDW and Data Collectors)

The SQL Server Management Data Warehouse (when you first come across it) seems to promise so much if the verbiage from Microsoft and some other websites is to to believed. But when you install it you may find that it is not as useful as it could be. This is a shame but we are currently only on v2 of the product with SQL 2012 so one hopes it will improve in subsequent versions. However, it probably is worth playing with if you have never used it before - at least you can show your boss some reports on general server health when he asks for it and you have nothing else in place. There is one big problem with it though if you decide that you don't want to use it any more, uninstalling it is not supported! Mad, I know. But as usual some very helpful people in the community have worked out, what seems to me, a pretty safe way of doing it. I had a problem with my MDW. The data collector jobs were causing a lot of deadlocking on some production servers and impacting performance. I...

How to configure the SSAS service to use a Domain Account

NB Updating SPNs in AD is not for the faint hearted plus I got inconsistent results from different servers. Do so at your own risk! If you need the SSAS account on a SQL Server to use a domain account rather than the local “virtual” account “NT Service\MSSQLServerOLAPService”. You may think you just give the account login permissions to the server, perhaps give it sysadmin SQL permissions too. However, if you try and connect to SSAS remotely you may get this error: Authentication failed. (Microsoft.AnalysisService.AdomdClient) The target principal name is incorrect (Microsoft.AnalysisService.AdomdClient) From Microsoft: “A Service Principle Name (SPN) uniquely identifies a service instance in an Active Directory domain when Kerberos is used to mutually authenticate client and service identities. An SPN is associated with the logon account under which the service instance runs. For client applications connecting to Analysis Services via Kerberos authentic...

SAN performance testing using SQLIO

Introduction This document describes how to use Microsoft’s SQLIO to test disk/SAN performance. It is biased towards SQL Server – which uses primarily 64KB and 8KB data pages so I am running the tests using those cluster sizes, however, other sizes can be specified. Download SQLIO from https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=20163 SQLIO is a command line tool with no GUI so you need to open a command prompt at C:\Program Files (x86)\SQLIO after you have installed it. Configuration First of all edit param.txt so that you create the test file we will be using. The file needs to be bigger than the combined RAID and on-board disk caches. In this case we are using a 50GB file. The “ 2” refers to the number of threads to use when testing, you don’t need to change this now. The “ 0x0” value indicates that all CPUs should be used, which you probably don’t want to change either, “ #” is a comment. The o...

SQL Server Snippets | Paul Hewson

Search This Blog