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DBA Days: Killing TempDB softly

September 8, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, SQL Server

badidea, dba, development, sql server

Don’t make me regret publishing this This really will take a server down immediately. You can restart it, as we learned during DBA Days, but… If you also go ahead and make this an Agent job that runs at startup, there are additional challenges. Like every time Agent starts up, your server goes down. Score…

DBA Days: Chaos Sloth

September 7, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

badidea, dba, development, sql server

I love a bad idea I mean, just look at me. I’m covered in them! So when Brent wanted to randomly make his server act crappy, I wrote a script for it. Usual caveats here. Don’t run this in production. I’m not responsible for anything you do after you hit copy and paste. In fact,…

Upcoming SQL Server 2019 Features

August 31, 2016

Humor, SQL Server 2019

If you think that’s big, you should see the size of the drink I happened to be in Seattle this week after finishing up an Alaska cruise, and I had the chance to sit down with some of the PMs responsible for upcoming SQL Server features. It turns out they’re already deep in development with…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Dynamically Generating 999 Indexes on a Table

August 25, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, Indexing, SQL Server

Let’s say, just theoretically, you wanted to demo a query that takes SQL Server a long time to compile. And in order to make SQL Server’s job tougher, you wanted to create the maximum number of indexes possible on a table. You might do something like this: Transact-SQL SELECT TOP 999 'CREATE INDEX [IX_' +…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Dynamically Generating Long Queries

August 24, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

As part of an experiment, I needed to build a really long query. (Don’t ask.) From another recent experiment, I know that SQL Server won’t let a query return more than 65,535 columns. I set about writing a one-line query that would return 65,535. I’m a big fan of writing the simplest reproduction scripts possible –…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Building a Fork Bomb in SQL Server

August 23, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

Somewhat different than a sex bomb, a fork bomb is a denial-of-service attack that just starts a process that replicates itself, thereby starting more and more processes until the service goes down. Wikipedia’s fork bomb page lists examples on most operating systems (including Windows). I’ve always found fork bombs funny because of their elegant simplicity, so…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Prevent the Use of the Database Engine Tuning Advisor

August 22, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

Every now and then, we put on our bad idea jeans in the company chat room and come up with something really ill-advised. We should probably bury these in the back yard, but…what fun would that be? Bad ideas are the most fun when they’re shared. One day, after seeing enough horrific but well-meaning indexes created…

Bad Idea Jeans: Dynamically Generating Ugly Queries and Task Manager Graffiti

August 11, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

Say you’re at Dell DBA Days, and you want to build a really ugly query, fast. You want to generate a StackOverflow database query that will take a long time to compile, and maybe demand a huge amount of memory to run, but not actually take any time to execute. You might start by building…

Dell DBA Days Prep: Country Songs About Databases

August 2, 2016

Humor, SQL Server

I travel a lot, and I’ve seen a lot of things, but even I was surprised this week when I sat down in a Cracker Barrel Restaurant that had the oddest soundtrack. It turns out there’s an entire sub-genre of country music that specializes in database songs. While I was sitting there eating my Uncle…

#DellDBADays 2016: What Would You Do with Unlimited Hardware?

June 2, 2016

Last August, we got the team together in person for Dell DBA Days. We ran all kinds of interesting experiments with SQL Server, and shared the results with you via live webcasts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn43sOLrcVs You can watch our recorded episodes from last year – I’d highly recommend the last one, Watch SQL Server Break and Explode. Erik…

Creating Tables and Stored Procedures in TempDB – Permanently

May 4, 2016

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, Parameter Sniffing, SQL Server, TempDB

No, not #tables – actual tables. Here’s how: USE tempdb; GO /* This one is only available during my session: */ CREATE TABLE #myTempTable (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Stuffing VARCHAR(100)); GO /* This one is global, meaning it's available to other sessions: */ CREATE TABLE ##myTempTable (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Stuffing VARCHAR(100)); GO /* You can create…

SQL Server 2005 support ends next week. Here’s my tribute to it.

April 4, 2016

Humor, SQL Server

I remember the first time I used SQL Server 2005. Did you know SQL Server has an expiration date on the bottom of the box? Also, this one is curdled. I was a database administrator working on a new-build data warehouse project in Miami. Both our data warehouse and SQL Server 2005 were looking like…

Microsoft Discontinues SQL Server Support for Windows

April 1, 2016

Microsoft announced today that the forthcoming SQL Server 2016 version won’t just run on Linux – it will only run on Linux. Mark Souza, Microsoft “When we started developing the Linux port of SQL Server, we weren’t really serious about it at all,” confessed Mark Souza, lead documentation author for the project. “But after a couple of weeks, we…

Announcing the SQL Server Theme Song Winners

March 28, 2016

Humor, SQL Server

We asked you to pick theme songs to play when SQL Server has issues, and holy cow, you sent in a ton of submissions. We couldn’t possibly pick just one in each category, so each of us picked our own winners – all of whom get a free training video class of their choice. (Folks who…

Contest: SQL Server Theme Songs

March 16, 2016

During this month’s Senior DBA Class in Chicago, I started joking with the attendees about what songs they should play during common DBA job tasks, like: Best Song to Play During a Server Outage Best Song to Illustrate Your Predecessor’s Skills Best Song to Accompany an Index Rebuild Best Song to Play When Examining a Slow Query Best…

Trace Flag 2330: Who needs missing index requests?

November 25, 2015

Bad Idea Jeans, Indexing, SQL Server

dba, development, sql server

Hey, remember 2005? What a great year for… not SQL Server. Mirroring was still a Service Pack away, and there was an issue with spinlock contention on OPT_IDX_STATS or SPL_OPT_IDX_STATS. The KB for it is over here, and it’s pretty explicit that the issue was fixed in 2008, and didn’t carry over to any later…

Brent’s Bad Idea Jeans: Stop People From Changing Tables with This One Trick

November 19, 2015

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

Developers hate his bad idea jeans: CREATE VIEW dbo.StopThemDead WITH SCHEMABINDING AS SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table1 UNION ALL SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table2 UNION ALL.... 123456 CREATE VIEW dbo.StopThemDead WITH SCHEMABINDINGASSELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table1UNION ALLSELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table2UNION ALL.... Presto, the schemabinding option means no one can change the underlying tables. (At least, until they figure…

The Nine Circles of Developer Hell

June 18, 2015

Commit message: Duck! Everyone’s code is terrible. But exactly how terrible is yours? First Circle: Code Limbo We can’t say this is good code, but for the most part nobody notices it. Second Circle: Code Lust Cool function, bro! Third Circle: Gluttonous Code There’s always one simple piece of logic that’s been written hundreds of…

Contest: Write the Scariest DBA Sentence (10 words or less)

May 28, 2015

Warm up your keyboard, it’s time for a contest. The challenge: Write the creepiest sentence you can come up with. You get 10 words max. An example to get you started: Oh, I’m sure someone set up the backups. The rules: Enter as often as you like (here on the blog, in the comments for…

Defragmentation Proven to Completely Fix Performance Issues

April 1, 2015

SPRINGFIELD – Local systems administrator Jackie Toole was carried through city streets today on the backs of ecstatic Acme Tooling employees. For months, Acme’s accounting department had complained of slow performance in their payroll application. “Saving a new hire took minutes, and we had no idea what was going on. Jackie did something, and next thing…

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