Granting Read-Only and administrative access to Central Management Server (CMS)

In one of my previous post, I had discussed about the Central Management Server and how to Register it.
In this post, I will be telling how to give read-only access and a Administrative access to an existing CMS.

Grating the Read-Only and Administrative access to CMS is very simply and the activity includes adding the right database users to right groups in msdb database.

Granting Read-Only access:

USE [msdb]
GO
CREATE USER [DBUserName] FOR LOGIN [LoginName]
GO
EXEC sp_addrolemember N'ServerGroupReaderRole', N'DBUserName'
GO

Granting Administrator access:
This access is usually give to the DBA's

USE [msdb]
GO
CREATE USER [DBAUserName] FOR LOGIN [DBALoginName]
GO
EXEC sp_addrolemember N'ServerGroupAdministratorRole', N'DBAUserName'
GO

Give access to a non sysadmin user to run Profiler

Sometimes as a DBA, you come across a situation where you need to give access to a non sysadmin user to run profiler on a particular SQL server.
If you try to run the profiler using the user who does not have sysadmin access then you will get the below error.

Here is the solution how to grant access to a non sysadmin user to run profiler.
Using Query: 

-- To Grant access to a Windows Login
USE master;
GRANT ALTER TRACE TO [Domain\WindowsLogin]

-- To Grant access to a SQL Login
USE master;
GRANT ALTER TRACE TO [SQL User]

Using SSMS:

1. Expand the Server in object Explorer
2. Expand "Security" folder and then "logins"
3. Right-Click on the login to which you need to give access and then go to "Properties" of that login
4. Go to "Securables" Tab
5. Select the server you want to add the permission
6. In the "Permission for <Server Name>" block, click on "Grant" check box for "Alter Trace" and click "OK"
7. Once this is completed, the permission should appear in the "Effective" Tab

Note: The Granter should be a sysadmin user.  

Convert Rows to Column using COALESCE() function

Using the below query we can convert the rows to column sperated by a delimiter.
In the query I am using ';' as the delimiter and you can change the delimiter of your choice by replacing ';'.
Data from Table:

Query:

Use AdventureWorks2008R2
GO
DECLARE @eMailList nvarchar(max) 

SELECT @eMailList = COALESCE(@eMailList + ';', '') + 
   CAST(eMail AS nvarchar(max))
FROM Employees

Select @eMailList as eMailList

Output of the above Query:

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Backup Database to multiple locations simultaneously - Mirror Backups

Database backup is one the regular activity a DBA would perform. Some times you might come across a situation where in you need to backup the database to different location. When I say backup database to different locations, it means that a copy of backup file needs to be placed on a different location as well and this is different from the Split Backups.

This is can be achieved by different methods,

1. Take backup and then copy to multiple location
2. Take backup of the same database multiple times pointing to different locations
3. Use "MIRROR TO" Option in the Backup command 

Using the option "MIRROR TO" is very simple, you just need to mention "MIRROR TO" and "WITH FORMAT" options in the normal BACKUP DATABASE Statement and you are done. The backup database statement with these two options will take the backup of the same database to multiple locations at the same time.

This option "MIRROR TO" is introduced in SQL Server 2005 and this works only in SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and later versions.

This can be used for all backup types and the Maximum number of "MIRROR TO" clauses that you can specify is three.

Example: 

BACKUP DATABASE AdventureWorks TO DISK = 'C:\Backup\AdventureWorks_Full.bak' MIRROR TO DISK = 'C:\Mirror\AdventureWorks_Full.bak' WITH STATS=10, FORMAT BACKUP DATABASE AdventureWorks TO DISK = 'C:\Backup\AdventureWorks_Differential.bak' MIRROR TO DISK = 'C:\Mirror\AdventureWorks_Differential.bak' WITH STATS=10, DIFFERENTIAL, FORMAT BACKUP LOG AdventureWorks TO DISK = 'C:\Backup\AdventureWorks_log.trn' MIRROR TO DISK = 'C:\Mirror\AdventureWorks_log.trn' WITH STATS=10, FORMAT

When it comes to restoring the database, we can use either of the backup copies to restore or recover the database.