I am waaaay overdue for a haircut, but instead of being a responsible adult, I stopped to take your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
- 00:00 Start
- 00:43 Mike: We have 3 Dell PowerEdge R630 servers with SQL Server installed. Everything functions for 3.5 years straight. How long is it expected to work?
- 01:30 Shalom: What are the worst incidents that you have witnessed due to SQL errors being routed to a mail folder that nobody ever reviewed?
- 02:40 TheBigMC: Hi Brent. I’m about to start a new job where I’ll be looking after 100 SQL Servers. I’ve been told that’s a guess. How can I reliably scan a network to find servers people don’t even know exist
- 05:00 Steph: Hi Brent, what are your top most dangerous seemingly benign SSMS menu items for which you shouldn’t approach your mouse pointer when connected on a prod database (for instance I once misclicked on ‘Fragmentation’ in ‘index properties’ on a prod db…). Thanks.
- 06:02 Tim: Hi Brent. With Windows Server 2022 you can set the allocation unit size of a disk up to 2M. Is 64k still the best practice for SQL Server?
- 07:58 DGW in OKC: Do people actually use Identity columns any more? What are the pros and cons of this practice?
- 08:26 IndexingForTheWin: Hi, the company I now work for has taken the decision since 3 years to completely stop index rebuilds and only do stats updates. Wouldn’t we benefit from rebuilds (perhaps yearly)?
- 09:18 Hamish: What are the pros/cons of using TSQL PRINT for debugging sprocs vs using table variables for debugging sprocs?
- 09:44 Max: A friend of mine ask, what is better – add a bit field and index it on VLTB (over 2 Tb in size) with 60+ fields and 13 indexes already OR create a new table to store PK values of rows which have value 1 for this new field? Thanks
- 12:10 John Bevan: Q1. When you have SQL running on an AzureVM, is it acceptable to use the D drive (i.e. low latency but ephemeral) over an attached disk for the TempDB?
8 Comments. Leave new
The R630 – those are about 6-8 years old now, would say whatever the state of SQL server is, the hardware is also probably already on borrowed time at this point even if it did live its entire life in a perfectly and continuously climate-controlled datacenter. Time for a project?
My clients have been really lucky with SQL problems from ignored alerts/serious alerts being buried in over-monitoring. But I did have a client take their exchange organization down over a weekend with some failed exchange backups + deciding to turn success alerts on for all SQL jobs that ran cumulatively 10,000+ times per day (and retry logic for jobs that would get interrupted by periodic storage quiesce) + thanks to the joys of thin provisioning in storage, caused corruption in some of the Exchange databases.
Hi Brent! Regarding the 1st question, where I did not mention SQL Server version. It is SQL Server 2017. The servers are working since 2019.
Checked SQLServerUpdates.com – it says support ends in October 2027. Checked on MS website – it says mainstream support ends in Oct 2022 (already), and extended ends in Ocober 2027.
So does that mean the hardware *theoretically* can work just fine until 2027 ?
(total 8 years, starting 2019 ) ?
Generally I’d advise folks to focus on mainstream support dates. Are you paying for extended support on the software and hardware?
Nope
Then there’s your answer – it’s already out of support.
Then also, what would your advice would be, to jump 2017 -> 2022, or wait SQL Server 2023/2024, as 2022 had some interesting v.1 features that need to bake more ?
And also, is there any magic number, for example 5 years, so after 5 years the general advice will be “hardware is too old, migrate immediately”
For personal advice on production servers, feel free to click Consulting at the top of the site.