I came across a very strange issue with replication this weekend. As a part of a release a new table was being created with extra columns and a view was created with the old table name that referenced the old column set (so as not to break old legacy applications). This table was replicated. The…
Month: February 2012
Why We Follow Best Practices
There are many reasons why we follow best practices. My own reasons have changed over the course of my career. Early in my career as a database developer and then later as a new DBA, I followed best practices because people who claimed to know more about SQL Server said to, and I assumed that…
Optimizing TempDB Performance
Today I thought I would blog about TempDB performance. On one of my new servers, with 24 cores, I allocated eight TempDB files as that should be enough to distribute the load, reduce contention and improve performance. However, I forgot to restart the server after hours and it went on for a week and performance…
Backup and Recovery
On the drive in this morning, I was reflecting on what I needed to go over with my junior DBA today in his learning path (channeling Yoda). Backup and Recovery is so vitally important to what we do on a daily basis that I really need to drive that home to him. Therefore, I thought…
Clustered Nuts?
While looking at performance in some of my databases, I noticed there was a high number of FreeSpace scans going on. Aaargh! They are called clustered indexes, people use them! Performance, performance, performance! In most cases it is best practices to start with a clustered index on every table created. There are rare instances when…
Saturday SQL Schoolhouse
Today’s installment of the Saturday SQL Schoolhouse is brought to you by our fine friends over at SQLCat, the Microsoft SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. I thought their post on Storage Top Ten Best practices would be a great learning opportunity. Enjoy! SQL Server Customer Advisory Team – SQL Server Best Practices. Continue reading on…
The Loneliness of the On Call DBA
There are lots of great things about being a SQL Server DBA. You get to play with lots of cool software; get the chance to spend someone else’s money on hardware; constantly be in a position to learn new things; and be a member of an awesome community. With the good always has to come…
Configuration Data Best Practice
After my recent Health and Risk Assessment visit from my Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, I learned some new and exciting SQL Server best practices and I thought that I would share them with you in this blog space. Our topic-o-choice today is all about backing up your configuration data. I must admit that I have…
Mass Updating Job Step Retry Attempts
Sometimes I find that the SQL Server team make curious choices as regards default operations. When setting up replication by default the log reader and distribution agent job steps will retry 2,147,483,647 times before failing. Doing the math on the retry interval of 1 minute that means that the job wouldn’t actually hit a failed…