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…
Something Technical This Way Comes
To quote Ray Bradbury in Something Wicked This Way Comes: “Everything that happens before Death is what counts.” Wow! How simple and profound. Do you live your life as if it counts for something? Do you have a passion? Are you living your life for that passion? My passion is best practices for SQL Server and I am…
I Am Passionate About Best Practices
After writing for the Tribal SQL project, I think I’ve realized just how passionate I am about best practices. For example, the other day I asked my wife if she could change our bed sheets to which she replied that they had only been on there two weeks. My retort was that best practices dictated changing the…
Saturday SQL Schoolhouse in Honor of World Backup Day
SQL Schoolhouse! Today’s installment of the Saturday SQL Schoolhouse is brought to you in honor of World Backup Day, a day every DBA should celebrate! However, DBAs know that World Backup Day should be practiced daily! Here are some great backup articles for you to peruse. Enjoy! Introduction to Backup and Restore Strategies in SQL…
SQL Server 2012 on VMware vSphere
Microsoft recently released SQL Server 2012 to the wild just a couple of weeks ago. Even though this release is in its infancy, organizations and their database administrators should immediately begin to explore and plan for the adoption of this release into their corporate technology roadmap. Multiple features in this release are individually tremendous, and…
Best Practicing, the Results Part Dos
This week, we have been talking about running the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.01 with the SQL Server Best Practice Analyzer for 2008 R2. Today I want to talk about one of the errors that occurred on one of the new boxes I just stood up in a new cluster. You may encounter a prerequisite error stating that the…
Best Practicing, the Results Part I
Yesterday, I showed you how to install the Best Practices Analyzer and use it through the Baseline Configuration Analyzer. Even after your servers are setup for best practices, it is good to run the BPA from time to time to look for changes, especially if you have more than one DBA working on your servers. Here…
Whitepaper: Demystify Tempdb Performance & Management
There are many misconceptions and myths about tempdb and purported best practices are inconsistent at best. It’s hard to know which advice to follow when one resource says to always do it one way and another tells you to always do it the opposite way. Many times, both resources are correct in certain situations or…
Best Practicing? Here’s How!
Are you trying to conform your systems to Microsoft standard best practices? Have you used Microsoft’s tools for automating this? The first item you will need is the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0 (download). It will help you to maintain optimal system configuration by analyzing against the predefined set of best practices which we will download…