Extract url / adress from hyperlink cell in Excel

1. Go to Visual Basic for Applications module by clicking Alt+F11
2. Create new Module by Insert->Module
3. Create a simple function in the newly created module

Function GetCellUrl(LinkCell as Range)

   If LnkCell.Hyperlinks.Count = 0 Then

      GetCellUrl = ""

   Else 

      GetCellUrl = LnkCell.Hyperlinks(1).Address

       End If


     End Function

SQL - How to delete table content quickly

The deletion of table content may take significant amount of time when the number of rows is large. This is so because every singe row deletion is logged into the database transaction log.
In the cases that the deletion log is not important you can simply remove the data rows w/o logging any individual row deletion by truncating the table:

TRUNCATE TABLE [TableName]

Reference:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177570.aspx

100% CPU usage by SQL Server - Look for Active (running) SQL queries

I found a very useful posts regarding analysis of currently running SQL queries and high SQL server load in Pinal Dave's blog.

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2009/01/07/sql-server-find-currently-running-query-t-sql/

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2009/01/02/sql-server-2008-2005-find-longest-running-query-tsql/

Using these tricks the culprit of the high load can be easily indicated.

Until the problem resolution is implemented KILL [session_id] can stop the problematic query w/o server restart or long waiting.