I wrote a somewhat popular script and blog post a while back called Breaking Down TempDB Contention. This post explains how to identify tempdb contention. This past Friday, Jonathan Kehayias (blog|@SQLPoolboy) contacted me about the script. Jonathan said that he thought the math was off just a little bit in the script. The original script…
Month: January 2012
The Kind of DBA I Want to Be
I was a big fan of the original Iron Chef tv show, as in the original show from Japan. And my favorite Iron Chef was Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. If you don’t know the show, it probably seems redundant to refer to a Japanese chef on a Japanese tv show as Iron Chef Japanese,…
Microsoft RAP, Not Just Clever Lyrics
We scheduled a Microsoft RAP, or Risk and Health Assessment Program, with our Premier Support representative to occur this week. This is an excellent program where a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer comes on site and assesses the risk and health of your SQL servers. We installed some new hardware and began a migration process moving…
xp_logininfo–Your View Into Active Directory
It’s always good to know what users have access to your SQL instances but when it comes to Active Directory users and groups it can quickly become complicated and you might not know who has access at any given time. Requests can come in for you to provide access to a user, but how can…
Transaction Log Fills Up the Drive….Oh No!
Maybe your users cannot access your database, or maybe your preferred monitoring software is reporting limited or non-existent disk space on your log drive for a particular SQL Server. Maybe you get a call from a Subject Matter Expert telling you their application is wigging out, or maybe you get a call from a user…
New Year House Cleaning
As I was driving in to the office today, I could not help but think of my wife’s cleaning efforts at home yesterday. She decided the holiday was a good time to remove the clutter from our kitchen cabinets and drawers. That inspired me this morning to do the same and hopefully put a smile…
Stop Bad Database Design
Every year that goes by I sit in hope that I won’t see bad database design. Every year I am disappointed. As an example here is a table create statement that I saw the other day (table and column names have been changed to protect the innocent) (more…)