Author Archives: JohnHowell

Found an interesting post about the SQL ISNULL function.  Apparently, it behaves differently if you’re using it to test strings.  For example: DECLARE @a VARCHAR(100)DECLARE @b VARCHAR(10) SET @a=’This is much longer than 10 characters‘SET @b=NULL — This will display—        … Continue reading →

I haven’t been as active on my Blog but I have been active on Twitter.  I’ll work on the blog but in the meantime you can follow me at #JohnMarkHowell on Twitter!

Everyone likes free books! Thanks to Chris for this one.

Powershell is one of those tools that people know is useful yet they are hesitant to pick it up and try it out.  Well, now you have no more excuses.  Dr. Tobias Weltner has provided a free ebook and blog … Continue reading →

When moving databases around, often people will truncate the logs and/or run DBCC SHRINKDATABASE but those only reduce the actual used space. They don’t actually shrink the database files themselves. DBCC SHRINKFILE is a bit picky in that in you … Continue reading →

The WEvtUtil utility is something I wrote about last year and up until recently I’ve just been using the qe command and piping the output.  However, I decided to use the epl (export-log) command to pull down the event log … Continue reading →

Just a reminder that you’ll want to install and check out the update to the power tools!  Good stuff! Happy Coding!

After spending several days in balmy (read – HOT & HUMID!) Alabama seeing my wonderful kids, I’m back and there’s more good stuff to talk about.  The first is VS LightSwitch 2011 is out!  LightSwitch lets you build nice looking … Continue reading →

This post isn’t about a technology but I read J. D. Meier’s post about Why Teams Fail and just had to share it.  We all have been there, in those dysfunctional projects.  J. D.’s post is a succinct list and … Continue reading →

Most developers write code to go against databases and often when doing performance testing and analysis, you can find yourself with a error something like “The transaction log for database ‘blahblah’ is full.”.   And many times this can come at … Continue reading →