JRevell.com

Migrating Servers to Azure – Activating Windows

October 2, 2018ComputersNo Comments

Recently I have migrated several servers from Vultr to Microsoft Azure. As part of this migration, windows became un-activated – most likely because Vultr runs it’s own KMS service and it is no longer able to contact the server: In order to resolve this, I changed the product key to…

SQL Server – Identify Unused Indexes

September 14, 2018ComputersNo Comments

Within SQL Server an index is used to optimise the reading of data from the database. However the side effect of having such an index is reduced write speed for inserts and updates. This is because SQL Server will need to update and maintain the index. Running the below SQL…

Windows 10 – Missing Taskbar Icons

September 6, 2018ComputersNo Comments

Had a very odd issue with Windows 10 and taskbar menu items missing: After lots of research, I’ve partially fixed this by running the following from an elevated command prompt: for /R "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\" %f in (.lnk) do copy /b "%f"+,, "%f" 1>nul for /R "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\" %f in (.lnk)…

Taskcentre – Recording Success / Failure using “Call Task” Tool

January 10, 2018January 10, 2018ComputersNo Comments

The “Call Task” tool in Taskcentre is a useful tool in calling other tasks. The task can run in two modes: Synchronous Queue Queue This adds the task to the queue, to be scheduled at a future point in time Synchronous This queues the task and awaits a response. Sometimes…

Using Dynamic Management Views to Recommend Indexes in SQL Server

October 5, 2017October 5, 2017ComputersNo Comments

Did you know that SQL Server provides several views which provide information on recommended indexes? Using the following SQL, you can identify where SQL recommends indexes, ordered by potential performance boost from adding the suggested index. Obviously you may wish to review these manually, rather than just blindly creating, but…

Azure SQL Database View Running Transactions / Blocking

September 21, 2017ComputersNo Comments

With the Azure SQL Database, sometimes you want to view the current running transactions. Unfortunately there is no GUI as such like there is with normal SQL Server (right click, “Activity Monitor”), however it can be grabbed by executing sys.dm_exec_requests. The following SQL is very useful as it shows details…

Azure SQL Database Index Size

September 19, 2017ComputersNo Comments

Recently I’ve been doing some work on optimising indexes within Azure SQL Database. The following SQL from Daniel is very useful in showing the status of all the current indexes within a SQL Database. The SQL works for both SQL Server 2014 onwards, plus Azure SQL Database. I have not…

Run Programs as a Domain User from None Domain Account

June 15, 2017June 15, 2017ComputersNo Comments

Following on from my blog post for running Microsoft Dynamics Nav as a different user here, I have done some further investigation of the runas command. Typically the RunAs command is used for local authentication, however there is a little known switch which bypasses local authentication and uses it for…

Delete Duplicate Records – Leave Only 1 Behind MS SQL

February 27, 2017ComputersNo Comments

Recently I’ve had to delete duplicate records from the Record Link table in Microsoft Dynamics Nav. Using the following SQL, (which uses the OVER clause for partitioning) this deletes all duplicate records, leaving the first unique item behind. The SQL can be updated easily to function for other tables /…

Suggesting MS SQL Index Creations Using sys.dm_db_missing_index_details

February 16, 2017ComputersNo Comments

Within SQL Server, sys.dm_db_missing_index_details returns indexes which it believes are required by the Query Optimiser. Basically as queries are run in the background, the Query Optimiser makes a record of any optimisations it feels are necessary. Restarting the SQL server resets all these stats. Using some SQL it is possible…