First off I should apologise as this really should have been posted a few weeks ago when it was a little more topical, but as I mentioned in my last post Weekly SQL Blog round up WC 20100815 unfortunately I’ve been off ill for a little while and am still catching up with a backlog of things in both my professional and family life.
I keep banging on about how great the SQL community is and I consider myself very lucky to work with a product where people are so keen to share their knowledge and experience with others. In fact this is the main reason that I blog – to help give something back.
Most if not all SQL professionals will have heard of SQLServerCentral.com, if you haven’t it’s a great community site with it’s own SQL Server forum where you can ask questions and receive answers from your peers. The site has a contribution center feature where registered members can submit articles, scripts and even a “Question of the day”. In true community spirit I shared one of the scripts that I had been working on. It was a great feeling when I received an email from SSC saying that my script would be published on their site. It was even listed in the daily digest email:
The decision to publish a script on SSC rather than my own site was based on the premise that it would gain more visibility and be able to help more people than if I were to list it here on my own blog. At the time of writing this it has received over 1,200 hits in under 3 weeks which has proved that I made the right decision.
The script itself can be found here. What the script does is to expand the functionality of sp_spaceused when you are trying to find the size of a database. If you have used sp_spaceused before you will know that it returns two result sets. My script combines these two resultsets into a single resultset but also returns the information for each database in the instance rather than just the database specified. This can really help you to monitor the size of your database over time.
I hope that you find the script useful, and just maybe I have even convinced you to share a script of your own with the community.