This week’s 5 tips will be on a topic very near to my heart, database corruption. I want to do the 5 tips a little differently this time. The tips will not just be 5 tips in no particular order. These tips will be tips as well as steps on what to do starting with…
Year: 2017
5 Tips for Friday: Preparing for the Holidays
With the holiday season upon us for much of the world, I find myself thinking of ways to ensure that we have a quiet season outside of the office. Nobody wants to spend a family get-together fixing problems at work. I know most of you know what I mean. It’s a DBA’s lot in life…
Restrict the usage of a SQL Server Authenticated Application Id
SQL Server login ids may not be the most secure thing in the world but they are likely to be around for quite a while and one of the more common uses of them is as an application id. An application uses a SQL Server id to connect to SQL and then controls its own…
5 Tips for Friday: Monitoring and Alerting
I really think monitoring is an under-appreciated topic in our industry. Sure, that’s several companies that make pretty good morning writing monitoring software. Cards on the table, I even worked for one of them several years ago. Whether you invest in 3rd party monitoring software or not, you really should have some full solution in…
Closing all of the connections to a database
Doing a database restore may not be the most common task a database professional will ever do, but it’s a lot more frequent than you might think. Operational restores are not exactly uncommon for example. Now, when you are doing a recovery like this, what is common is that there are people in the database.…
5 Tips for Friday: Naming Conventions
I want to talk about some best practices concerning naming conventions. Most teams or organizations will come up with their own naming conventions for things. This post is not here to tell anyone how to define their naming conventions, especially for things outside of SQL Server. I want to talk specifically about things inside the…
Time Zones are a Drag ... Seriously
Time Zones were definitely being a drag today. I got an email from one of the developers at work asking about the performance difference between 2 queries. The only difference between the 2 queries is that one of them uses the AT TIME ZONE clause that was added in SQL Server 2016. I have not…
Why shouldn’t I shrink my database data file?
A while back I did a post about why you shouldn’t shrink your data file. This one is going to be similar in some ways, different in others. TL;DR: It’s pretty pointless and will almost certainly cause performance issues. Let’s start by asking why you might want to shrink your data file. It’s too big…
5 Tips for Friday: Waits and Queues
This Friday I want to talk about some best practices for troubleshooting queries using waits and queues. Waits and queues are excellent tools for trying to figure out why a query is running slower than you think it should be running. When a query has to wait for some reason, the query enters a suspended…
5 Tips for Friday: Replication
Time to talk about a subject that most DBAs hate, but some DBAs like me have a love-hate relation with it. Replication. Not storage replication or Availability groups. That old workhorse SQL Server data replication. Limit the number of articles per publication: Having to occasionally rebuild replication is a humongous pain in the backside, but…