Tag: sql

Sometimes you need to find database or tables sizes to find out what is taking the most disk space in a Microsoft SQL database server. Following two queries can be very handy in such case. Result looks following.

Sometimes you need to clean and shrink SQL database, since once database grows even if all records get deleted, the database file would still take the space as before clean up. To achieve this we can manually delete records and call SHRINKFILE command. However, it’s important to delete records in small batches in transaction not to clog up the database server.

RefreshViews is simple stored procedure to refresh all database views in a Microsoft SQL database server. This is especially useful when working with legacy systems that have select * from some_view like queries in views, and needs updating after adding/removing columns.

SQL quick row count script gets row counts for all tables in a database in Microsoft SQL database servers. Result looks following.

If you used a SQL login and needed to restore a database (dev/test), you should notice that your SQL login doesn’t work for the database anymore. The reason for this is that SQL login and database user mapping was lost. Even you can see the user name in database user’s mapping, however in internal SQL memory the restored database’s user has different reference than the SQL login.

Continue reading Fix SQL database user mapping

Sometimes you need to find a specific string or value in a database that you are not familiar with. You may not know where to start since a completely new database for you, or there are just way too many tables. In such cases there is a very handy stored procedure that searches for a string through all the tables.

The best practice to run SQL queries is to run them in transaction and wrap with SQL’s Try … Catch statement, so we could rollback the transaction, and throw an exception. Below is the code snippet that would do it all.

One more useful SQL code snippet – sp_generate_inserts. This stored procedure (SP) generates SQL insert statements of existing data from the table specified. It is a very handy script when you have limited options to make a database backup file, but still need to export data.

This script was originally written by Narayana Vyas Kondreddi back in 2002, however his website is not accessible any more. Therefore I had to slightly modify the script to work on Azure SQL databases, since Azure SQL has some limitations/changes compared to classical MSSQL.