SQL Server

First Responder Kit, SQL Server

So you’d like to fix a bug or contribute code to the First Responder Kit, but you’re new to Github. Let’s get started. 1. Open a new issue on Github. Go to the Github issues list for this repo, and start a new issue. Here’s the example that I’m going to work on today: Example…

Announcing Dell DBA Days 2016: The SQL

Last Updated July 19, 2016

This August, we’re goin’ back to Texas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHv_4tHs0i0 Last year, we flew the team out to Round Rock, Dell’s HQ, and ran all kinds of SQL Server experiments in their hardware labs. We broadcasted a whole bunch of webcasts live on the net for you to watch and see what we learned. This year, we’re…

Well, That Sucked: Laying Off Half the Company

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Company News, SQL Server

Company retreat, 2016 I always wanna be honest with you, dear reader, and let you see how running a lil’ consulting shop goes. It’s been fun sharing a lot of our happy growing moments along the way. This one, though, is a lot less fun to share. Yesterday, we had to let go of Angie, Doug,…

New SQL Server First Responder Kit for 2016-07

Last Updated July 15, 2016

First Responder Kit, SQL Server

SQL Server 2012 SP3, 2014 SP2, and 2016 users are going to find a lot of stuff to love in here. The new per-query memory grants fields in the plan cache are exposed in sp_BlitzCache, and sp_BlitzFirst also shows memory grants for live running queries in @ExpertMode = 1. Here’s the details: sp_BlitzCache v3.1: Show…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/07/13 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated July 17, 2016

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

SQL Server, Videos

This week, Erik, Tara, Jessica, Doug, and Angie discuss queries, installing multiple instances of SQL server on a Windows VM, using DENY Database rules, migrating databases to Amazon RDS, availability groups, using filtered indexes, and more! Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen…

Why Not Just Create Statistics?

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Indexing, SQL Server, Statistics

Here at Brent Ozar Unlimited We have a proud tradition of not blaming index fragmentation for everything. There are points you should deal with it, but they’re probably not 5% and 30% and 1000 pages. But that’s not what this blog post is about. I’m hoping to clarify why we’re more interested in up to…

Can Adding an Index Make SQL Server 2016…Worse?

Last Updated April 9, 2017

Execution Plans, SQL Server

Using the StackOverflow database, let’s check out Krock’s query. He’s a competitive fella, and he’s looking to find users who signed up for StackOverflow after he did, but who have a higher reputation than he does. I’m going to simplify the query a little here: Transact-SQL SELECT me.Id, u.Id FROM dbo.Users me JOIN dbo.Users u on…

New Course: Statistics – SQL Server’s Guessing Game

Last Updated April 9, 2017

Closed captioned for your statistical pleasure You have to make queries go faster, and you suspect that outdated or inaccurate statistics are hurting your execution plans. Doug Lane is here to help with his new video course, Statistics: SQL Server’s Guessing Game. It’s phenomenally detailed – every single person on our team learned stuff from…

SQL Server 2014 SP2: DBCC CLONEDATABASE

Last Updated July 12, 2016

Getting developers production data stinks DBAs are stuck in this annoying cycle where they need to give developers production, or production-like data, but… Production data can be huge. Hundreds of gigabytes if you’re lucky, several terabytes if you’re not. Then once it gets there, you have other considerations. Either you lock down Dev, or you…

New Sample Databases From Microsoft

Last Updated July 4, 2016

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

In celebration of AdventureWorks being out of business for a decade Microsoft has released a couple new databases. Wide World Importers is a fresh-faced start up, probably a drug smuggling front, run out of a basement office next to a temp agency. There’s some JSON involved. No one ordered bikes. It’s a hoot. The OLTP…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/07/06 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated April 9, 2017

This week, Brent, Jessica, Richie, Doug, and Angie discuss snapshot replication, file and table-level restores, whether you should enable lock pages in memory, redistributing data across files or a database, and Doug’s new video class. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen on…

Last Day Shenanigans

Last Updated July 4, 2016

To follow up on my NY Times Best Selling blog post On First Day Deal Breakers, here’s something you can do on your last day, as a friendly reminder that everyone is losing a valued team member. Change the color of everyone’s error messages. Dammit. “Change the font too.” –Brent Monstrous. Probably the meanest part…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: Mind Your Backup Jobs

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Backup and Recovery, SQL Server

I’ll get right to the point While you’re Direct Seeding, you have to be careful with any other full or differential backup jobs running on the server. This is an artifact of the Direct Seeding process, but it’s one you should be aware of up front. In the screencap below, courtesy of sp_whoisactive there’s a…

The Top 10 Feature Requests for SQL Server on Connect.Microsoft.com

Last Updated July 2, 2016

When a man loves a woman very much, he goes to Connect.Microsoft.com and upvotes her feature requests. I was curious to see what requests were resonating the most with folks, so I went through the list of feature requests sorted by votes: 1. Please fix the “String or binary data would be truncated” message to give…

TDE and Backup Compression: Together At Last

Last Updated September 21, 2017

Note: THERE ARE BUGS IN THIS FEATURE. Make sure you read all the way through the post to catch the updates from Microsoft as more bugs were found. TDE is one of those things! You either need it, and quickly learn how many things it plays the devil with, or you don’t need it, and…

Breaking News: 2016 Query Store cleanup doesn’t work on Standard or Express Editions

Last Updated September 21, 2017

Breaking News, First Responder Kit, Query Store (QDS), SQL Server

If you’re using SQL Server 2016’s awesome new feature, Query Store, there’s a new bug with automatic cleanup. Books Online explains: Automatic data cleanup fails on editions other than Enterprise and Developer. Consequently, space used by the Query Store will grow over time until configured limit is reached, if data is not purged manually. If…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/06/29 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated July 2, 2016

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

This week, Erik, Richie, Doug, and Angie discuss a script for getting more information on a specific index, using partition tables, shrinking data and log files, stress testing SQL servers, as well as some entertaining things to ask Siri! Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: TDE’s Frenemy

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server

From the Mailbag In another post I did on Direct Seeding, reader Bryan Aubuchon asked if it plays nicely with TDE. I’ll be honest with you, TDE is one of the last things I test interoperability with. It’s annoying that it breaks Instant File Initialization, and mucks up backup compression. But I totally get the…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: Extended Events and DMVs

Last Updated February 9, 2017