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…
Breaking Down TempDB Contention (part 2)
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…
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…)
Please Don’t Use Deprecated Data Types
I know that a lot of vendors like to write for the lowest common denominator (i.e. SQL 2000) but really folks it’s gone too far. I’m sick of cracking open vendor code that’s certified for SQL 2008 and seeing things like IMAGE and TEXT data types. Microsoft deprecated these things back when they released SQL…