For my final blog about SQL Saturday #132, I wanted to leave you with one all-encompassing piece of advice that I received from the pre-conference training on Friday prior to the event. The pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). Of course, I will preface this…
Year: 2012
Green? If You Only Knew the Power of the Dark Side!
Default Server Power Plan Continuing my blog series from SQL Saturday #132, I wanted to review one piece of good advice I received from the pre-conference training on Friday prior to the event. The pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). The default power setting for a new server…
Good Best Practice Advice from the Pensacola Pre-Con, Round Two
Yesterday, I wrote about some advice that I received at the pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” which was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog) from SQL Saturday #132 in Pensacola, Florida. Here are some more gems: Instant File Initialization is critical for performance, read more from Kimberly L. Tripp (twitter|blog). If you…
Generic Database Restores
The other day I found myself in the position of needing to restore multiple databases to a server. In this case all the log files would be on one drive and all the data files on another. Rather than sit there and write restore scripts for ~20 databases I figured it would be quicker to…
Good Best Practice Advice from the Pensacola Pre-Con
For my first blog about SQL Saturday #132, I wanted to review some of the good advice I received from the pre-conference training on Friday prior to the event. The pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). Some of these I knew, some…
Removing a Perfectly Good Cluster, Part Two
Yesterday I started a new project to downgrade our two new SQL Server 2008 R2 clusters down to SQL Server 2008 clusters. The uninstall went off without a hitch as we removed both nodes and then removed the support tools. I find it interesting that when we went to install the 2008 server, there was still tempDB…
Vendor Support–The Good And Bad
When you go out and buy yourself new hardware or software you have the option of purchasing maintenance agreements at the same time. For software this generally provides the ability to constantly upgrade to the latest and greatest product. For hardware this tends to provide onsite support for when things go wrong and an SLA…
SQL Rally 2012 Recap and Session Files
SQL Rally 2012 was hosted by the North Texas SQL Server User Group. More tha anything, it was nice to be back in the area where I grew up. I was born in Houston, but I grew up in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. It really brought back a lot of great memories for me like…
Who Owns Your Databases And Jobs?
Quick question, who owns your databases? And how about your jobs? Don’t know? Go find out…now find out without using the GUI. Querying sys.databases will give you the owner_sid. The trouble is that you have to relate that owner_sid back to a user. The same with sysjobs, that sid needs to relate to someone. You…
The Importance Of Good Documentation
Believe it or not I’m not actually talking about server documentation here (for an excellent post on that go read Colleen Morrow’s The Importance of a SQL Server Inventory). I have spent the last 12 days dealing with a single production release. It is being considered a significant release, but to be honest it really…