Production Database Administration

When there’s a performance emergency, a lot of us perform the same manual tasks over and over. We run sp_BlitzWho or sp_WhoIsActive, look for blocking, long-running or out-of-control queries, and kill them. I’m going to build a new sp_kill for the First Responder Kit to make that easier, faster, and safer, and I want your…

Last week, I asked if your database administrators could read all of the data in all databases. The results (which may be different from this post, because I’m writing the post ahead of time and the poll is still open): Yes: 61% Yes, but we trust them not to: 29% Yes, if they bypass tech…

It’s a simple question: can your database administrators read all of the data in all databases? Yes Yes, but we trust them not to – as in, we’ve got written policies in place, and they know they’re not supposed to go poking around in the payroll tables or the human resources database Yes, if they…

There was an interesting post on Reddit yesterday asking what DBA jobs are like these days. Here’s a snippet of the most important part: Our friend works for maybe 15 hours a week, on call for maybe 40 but is always running around not in front of his computer. She works odd hours, takes the…

Last week, I asked y’all how frequently you ran your full backups, corruption checks, index maintenance, and stats updates. The results after over 1,000 responses: A few thoughts: You’re typically taking full backups daily or weekly. I’m actually surprised by how many folks do weekly backups! That kinda scares me because if the backups take…

How often do you run backups, corruption checking, index maintenance, and statistics updates? Click here to take the anonymous poll. After you fill it out, you’ll be able to see the average responses from other folks. I’ll circle back next week and share the answers, plus chime in with my thoughts. Update – I’ve closed…

You are not ready for how weird my take is. Last week at the PASS Summit conference in Seattle, Microsoft showed off the upcoming SQL Server Management Studio v21. One of the most intriguing features is that it has Copilot built in. No, not Github Copilot, that’s a different thing. No, not the Copilot in…

I was chatting with a client’s DBA about this thought-provoking blog post about data governance in the age of generative AI. The DBA’s concern was, “What if we hook up generative AI tools to the production database, and someone asks for, say, recommended salary ranges for our next CEO based on the current CEO’s salary?…

SQL Server Management Studio 20 Preview 1 is out, and the new connection dialog has a big change: When you click Connect, you’re likely going to get an error: The fastest fix is to click the Encryption dropdown, and change it to Optional: And then you’ll be able to connect fine. The long term fix…

Every now and then, someone asks a question on PollGab about why I don’t use ChatGPT to answer these questions. And sometimes, I wonder that myself – I wonder why people don’t put their questions into ChatGPT, especially GPT 4, because it’s pretty damned good. I did this a while ago using ChatGPT 3.5, which…

Sometimes, I don’t care if questions get a lot of upvotes at https://pollgab.com/room/brento – I just don’t wanna answer ’em. They’re not necessarily bad questions, but I’m just not interested in them, or I’ve answered them repeatedly, or I don’t have a good answer. Maybe y’all do, though, so I’ve numbered these. If you want…

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento have easy one-line answers. Let’s knock ’em out: George: Hi Brent, what recently has been the most challenging/surprising/new-to-you performance issue you have encountered? SQL Server 2019’s slowdowns. I spent days working on that. RoJo: Have you used Distributed AG as a way to upgrade major versions of…

Sometimes, y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and they don’t get a lot of upvotes, and reading through ’em, I bet it’s because other people don’t quite understand what you’re asking. I think there might actually be a good question at the heart of it, but … I’m just not sure what it is, and it needs…

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long-winded responses. Brandon: Do you seen a rise in json queries to address impedance mismatch between data/objects? I struggled with EF to produce a query that was neither simple nor complicated against a properly designed db (according to 2 experts). Dropped EF; used json query…