While configuring Linked server to oracle database from SQL server, faced following error,   Error: “ORA-12504: TNS: listener was not given the SERVICE_NAME in CONNECT_DATA” (Microsoft SQL Server Error: 7303)     I did following validation checks to ensure things are in place: Tnsnames.ora – validated that SID is present in tnsnames.ora file which is generally located in C:\Oracle\product\11.2.0\client_1\network\admin\ folder Validate syntax of connection string, it should be in below format, ORA123 = (DESCRIPTION = […]

Sometimes there is need to take full dump for various kind of SQL Server issues and most of the time a DBA don’t know when issue going to occur hence becomes difficult to capture the dump, now to do same we need to have a standard approach, this post is compiled to work as procedure to take required dump file or automate it via trigger to ensure dump is taken even when no one is […]

NET USE command syntax:   net use [{devicename | *}] [\\computername\sharename[\volume] [{password | *}]] [/user:[domainname\]username] [/user:[dotteddomainname\]username] [/user:[username@dotteddomainname] [/home {devicename | *} [{password | *}]] [/persistent:{yes | no}] [/smartcard] [/savecred] [/delete] [/help] [/?]   Refer for more details: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/commandlinereference/p/net-use-command.htm   Examples of NET USE: Net Use Command Examples: net use * “\\server\my media” /persistent:no In this example, net use command is used to connect to the my media shared folder on a computer named server. The […]

While working with Symantec NetBackup utility for SQL Server came across Retry option, this helps in reducing manual effort spend in retrying failed backups, but in some scenarios there is certain overhead as well, below is brief info about this option,   How Retry Parameter works for SQL Server Backups   If you like to setup NetBackup to retry failed backups automatically then you can use following three parameters along with other, RETRYTYPE AUTO        #This parameter […]

I have written several batch files to automate activities in SQL Server environment and send HTML reports over email on completion; but whenever SQL Server is down or server is unavailable then the HTML output get disturbed as no error handling is being done. When tried to write error handling to fix the issue, faced trouble as was using following code as part of an error handling,   FOR /F “tokens=1,2 delims=,” %%G in (%CD%\SQLServerList_SQLReport.txt) […]