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[Video] Office Hours at Sea: Leaving Juneau

Brent Ozar
Videos
0

I stopped piloting the ship long enough to answer your top-voted database questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 00:42 Dirty_Pages: You mentioned recently how much you swear, what is your favorite swear word(s) and why? Any favorite insults?
  • 02:38 SQLCircus.Clown: What is your go to/default SQL datatype for storing a run of the mill date and time data? DateTime2(3), DateTime2(7), or DateTimeOffset? DateTimeOffset make sense if the date/time will always be in UTC? Does the good old datetime datatype still have a place?
  • 03:27 Pixma: Hi Brent! I have a legacy database that now needs to cater for international/unicode data. It has hundreds of tables with char/varchar columns of which just some will need to handle unicode data. Do you have any experience or tips or gotchas for dealing with this kind of change?
  • 05:53 Ramon Wolfer: Hi Brent, how about a home tour? You mentioned in one session your home theater. I would really appreciate to see that or your garage / car collection. Thanks for sharing your knowledge in such an entertaining way 🙂
  • 07:09 I’ll be BacH: Hey Brent, If I want to work with Big Data, then which type of company should I work for?
  • 08:40 Persephone: What are the pros/cons of hosting multiple tenants in separate databases in Azure SQL DB? Is plan cache a concern in this scenario?
  • 09:33 Heimdall: For Entity Framework / SQL shops, should the DBA also know E.F. in order to troubleshoot / tune SQL queries?

[Video] Office Hours in Glacier Bay, Alaska

Brent Ozar
Videos
2 Comments

Thankfully, we didn’t hit any icebergs or glacier droppings, so I put my comfiest coat on to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we discussed:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 01:29 gb DBA: Hi Brent, I have over 200 threads with BROKER_RECEIVE_WAITFOR type when I execute sp_whoisactive and some of trx have high numbers on reads and CPU. Should I be concerned about these waits or they can be ignored?
  • 02:17 NotCloseEnoughToRetirementToStopLearning: Hi Brent…love your content thank you for all you do. You mention HackerNews is one of your sources for tech news. How do you curate the articles to what interests you?
  • 03:10 TheCuriousOne: Hi Brent! On a client system with strict access restrictions, which permissions do you absolutely need for effectively being able to do some performance tuning research?
  • 04:47 TJ: Hi Brent, what are your troubleshooting steps for when a query runs slow in one environment with higher specs and runs fast in another environment with lesser specs?
  • 05:57 Manoj: What is your opinion of hierarchyid data type in SQL Server? Do you see frequent performance issues with it?
  • 06:20 Efraim: What do you think about SQL 2022 Intel QAT backup support? Is this a game changer for multi-TB DB backups?
  • 07:08 Parminder: Do you see more SQL host machine failure rates in the cloud or on-prem? What are the top failures you see?
  • 08:18 Sigríður: Do you have a recommended way to find the top queries using TempDB the most?
  • 09:07 DBA_Mufasa: Salut Brent! What is your best advices for running Check DB on a larger database (~1TB) that is part of a 2 node AG with a non readable replica. Should i run the full check DB on both the primary and secondary around the same time or just run it on one and use WITH PHYSICAL_ONLY
  • 10:46 neil: Can a company have both a prod DBA and a dev DBA? Would they be on the same team or different teams? What if there was only one, who would hire the other one?
  • 12:35 Piotr: Who is the Brent Ozar for linked server query tuning?
  • 13:38 I’ll be BacH: Hey Brent, My company is thinking about enabling Row or Page level compression to save storage space. Is there a way to find out how many additional CPU cores are required to offset the compression workload? I’d like to compare cost of extra storage vs extra core licenses.
  • 15:38 Petey: Why would a linked server’s Data Access property change from true to false? This is happening occasionally (for no reason that I have been to find yet), and is causing a vendor-supplied job that relies on it to fail. What can I look for to catch the change in the act?
  • 18:11 TheyBlameMe: Hi Brent. Have you ever managed to combine your love of cars and SQL Server via your consulting work?
  • 18:56 ProochingMan: For documenting architecture and/or data lineage, we try to use Visio. But manually creating/managing that is very time consuming and prone to human error and not updating. Have you seen any good tools being used out there amongst all your customers?

AWS Aurora Cut Our Database Costs for SQL ConstantCare® – Again.

Brent Ozar
Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL ConstantCare
3 Comments

In May, Amazon brought out a new Aurora I/O Optimized Serverless instance type. By switching to it, we cut our database costs by 43% overnight, saving us about $1,200 per month.

No strings attached. Just lower prices.

So what’s the magic? Well, customers of our SQL ConstantCare® service send us diagnostic data every day for thousands of SQL Servers around the world. We import that data, process it, analyze it, and then send emails with specific actions we want the customers to take on their servers.

It’s a lot of data shuffling around, which means a lot of IO. We bring in so much new data every day, and we only keep 30 days of it online. We can’t just tune queries to cut IO: it’s legitimately new data going into the system, and that’s gotta make it to disk. (We’ve even tried cutting the data we import, too.)

When we broke out costs per day, the top cost was IO:

That’s the magic of AWS’s newest serverless price offering: it’s specifically designed for people who do a lot of IO. Amazon’s press release said it would offer “up to 40% cost savings for I/O intensive applications where I/O charges exceed 25% of the total Aurora database spend.” That’s us, alright!

If you’re using AWS Aurora, and your StorageIOUsage costs are like ours, you owe it to yourself to flip the switch over to the new instance type. Go into the portal, modify your cluster, and check out the storage configuration options:

You can switch over to I/O optimized with just mouse clicks, no cluster changes or app changes required. If you find out the cost structure doesn’t work out in your favor, you can just switch right back. (AWS does have guardrails in place to make sure you don’t flip back & forth repeatedly for busy periods.)

This new change helped us confidently run free trials for SQL ConstantCare® this month, too. Why not try it and see what you learn about your SQL Servers?

Poll: Are You Going Back to In-Person Events?

Brent Ozar
Conferences and Classes
14 Comments

Two short yes/no questions about regional & national conferences:

(If you can’t see the yes/no questions or the results, click here to view the blog post.)

I’ll close the poll after a week and write up my thoughts about the results.

Announcing 30-Day Free Trials for SQL ConstantCare®. Check Your SQL Servers Now.

Brent Ozar
SQL ConstantCare
3 Comments

You’re responsible for the health and performance of your company’s SQL Servers.

You can’t afford most monitoring products because they’re priced per-server. Your manager just can’t justify spending tens of thousands of dollars.

Besides, monitoring tools just spam you. You end up with an Outlook rule that dumps all their emails into a folder, and what’s the point of having a monitoring system at that point?

Meet SQL ConstantCare®. For one low price, we send you just one email per server per day, only when there are specific tasks you need to perform on that server.

Over 300 companies rely on it every day to monitor over 2,000 SQL Servers.

This month only, we’re offering a free 30-day trial: sign up and we won’t charge your card for 30 days. Don’t like it? Don’t feel like you learned enough about your servers? Just cancel anytime before 30 days is up, and you won’t pay a thing.

Wanna learn more? Check out the quick start instructions and the frequently asked questions.

Let’s see what you learn about your SQL Servers!

[Video] Office Hours at Sea: SQL Server Q&A

Brent Ozar
Videos
0

En route from San Francisco to Juneau aboard the Ruby Princess, I stopped to hit a few of your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 00:46 DBACAT: Hi Brent, what statistics impact occurs when a transaction is rolled back? The query’s exec plan didn’t change but duration and CPU jumped 10X. Stats were updated at the time of the transaction. Does SQL roll stats back? It doesn’t seem so. Seems like SQL got all confused.
  • 04:33 Whiny App Developer: Hi Brent a well-intentioned index has been added to our app’s database. My friend can see it has caused one query to slow down, and the team aren’t sure when it was added or what it might have sped up. What’s your opinion on DBAs making changes without informing the app’s team?
  • 06:11 RaduDBA: I don’t necessarily have a question, but I need some encouragement and emotional support since my company still uses SQL 2000 (not a joke, not a type) and they don’t want to migrate since the app still works fine. It’s a government institution, somewhere in the Midwest.
  • 07:17 Whiny DBA: Hi Brent, what is your opinion of developers that want total control of non-clustered index creation/modification/deletion on production SQL servers?
  • 08:45 Eduardo: Do you recommend any specific MS Excel skills for the production SQL DBAs?
  • 08:54 Mars: Hi Brent, what are your predictions for DBA in a next 10 years? And how do you feel about the chatgpt etc. Is it a threath for DBAs? And if yes what we should do to save our jobs? Bit shout Out to you and what are you doing for sql community. Thanks
  • 11:07 Arlo Fuller: Hi Brent, what realistic options are available for implementing multi-master replication between multiple Always On Availability Groups? I had looked at peer to peer replication but not sure if it supports AAG’s.
  • 12:44 Ildjarn: Have you ever considered using Powershell for sp_Blitz, only querying the data that you need with e.g. dbatools, and then do the parsing in Powershell? The advantage would be that you offload the parse stuff to a management system, leaving CPU free for SQL Server’s actual job

Breaking News: SQL Server 2022 Keeps Getting Worse.

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
71 Comments

<sigh> Okay, so, the last few Cumulative Updates have had known issues around broken remote queries using the generic ODBC connector and errors with contained availability groups, but I couldn’t really care less about those. If you use those features, I give you bombastic side eye anyway.

However, in the last few days, two more known issues have surfaced.

The first problem is that Cumulative Update 4 can give you incorrect query results when all of these are true:

  • Your index explicitly specifies the sort order, like DESC or ASC (see update below)
  • Your query has a WHERE filter on that sorted column using an IN list or multiple equality searches
  • Your query has an ORDER BY with the sort order as the index (which is, after all, why you created the index)

So for example, this can give me incorrect query results:

To work around that problem, the CU4 documentation suggests you uninstall CU4 or enable trace flag 13166 and free the plan cache.

Update: in the comments, Paul White points out that trace flag 13166 skips a logic step when building query plans, but it only applies to descending index keys. That means the CU4 documentation might be wrong, and this bug might only apply to indexes with a descending key specified.

The second problem is memory dumps every 15 minutes if you have both Query Store and Parameter-Sensitive Plan Optimization (PSPO) turned on. Microsoft says they’re working on this issue, but for now, the workaround is to disable Query Store or PSPO, or continuously delete PSPO plans from Query Store yourself.

Should you do new installations of SQL Server 2022 today? I’m not going to give you the answer, dear reader – instead, I wanna hear your opinion in the comments. If you were deploying a mission-critical production server in June, which SQL Server version would you pick?

Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Data Platform Community? May/June 2023 Edition

Brent Ozar
Who's Hiring
3 Comments

Is your company hiring for a database position as of May/June 2023? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s set up some rapid networking here.

If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules:

  • Your comment must include the job title, and either a link to the full job description, or the text of it. It doesn’t have to be a SQL Server DBA job, but it does have to be related to databases. (We get a pretty broad readership here – it can be any database.)
  • An email address to send resumes, or a link to the application process – if I were you, I’d put an email address because you may want to know that applicants are readers here, because they might be more qualified than the applicants you regularly get.
  • Please state the location and include REMOTE and/or VISA when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE.
  • Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn’t a household name, please explain what your company does.
  • Commenters: please don’t reply to job posts to complain about something. It’s off topic here.
  • Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.

If your comment isn’t relevant or smells fishy, I’ll delete it. If you have questions about why your comment got deleted, or how to maximize the effectiveness of your comment, contact me.

Each month, I publish a new post in the Who’s Hiring category here so y’all can get the latest opportunities.

Microsoft Build 2023 Keynote Live Blog: Introducing Fabric

Brent Ozar
Conferences and Classes
2 Comments

Goooood morning, party people! Today is the opening day of the annual Microsoft Build conference, an event focused on people like developers and power users who build things with Microsoft tools.

I’ve never attended Build in person before because the data part of the event tends to be fairly thin, and the releases for Azure SQL DB and SQL Server aren’t usually tied to Build’s dates. This year, it’s a hybrid event, both in-person in Seattle and online.

I’m at home in Vegas, attending virtually, and I’ll live-blog the keynote. Refresh this page starting at 9AM Pacific, noon Eastern, to see my thoughts on news as it comes out.

The first bits of news are already starting to trickle out: this morning, the SSMS release notes were updated to mention Microsoft Fabric SQL Endpoint and Fabric Data Warehouse. Yes, those would be new products, and yes, Microsoft already has something called Fabric, but this is different. If you’re bored before the keynote, you can go through this morning’s Github checkin for the Build event.

You can join me, but to do it, you’ll need a free registration for Build, so head over there now before the keynote starts at 9AM Pacific.

8:45AM: Based on this morning’s check-ins, looks like they’ll be announcing Hyperscale databases in elastic pools. Each Hyperscale elastic pool supports up to 25 databases on standard series hardware, max 100TB data in the pool. Still stuck at 100 MB/sec throughput on the log file though, and even worse, it maxes out at 130MB/sec across the entire pool.

8:49AM: From the new documentation: Fabric Data Warehouse “provides two distinct data warehousing experiences. Each Lakehouse automatically includes a SQL Endpoint to enable data engineers to access a relational layer on top of physical data in the Lakehouse, thanks to automatic schema discovery. A Synapse Data Warehouse or Fabric Warehouse provides a ‘traditional’ data warehouse and supports the full transactional T-SQL capabilities you would expect from an enterprise data warehouse. Either data warehousing experience exposes data to analysis and reporting tools using T-SQL/TDS end-point.”

8:54AM: From the documentation update list: “Optimized locking available in Hyperscale – Optimized locking is a new Database Engine capability that offers an improved locking mechanism that reduces lock memory consumption and blocking amongst concurrent transactions. This fundamentally improves concurrency and lowers lock memory. Optimized locking is now available in all DTU and vCore service tiers, including provisioned and serverless.”

8:58AM: Analysis thoughts on reading the Github checkins so far: this looks like yet another iteration of Microsoft’s data warehousing strategy that just can’t maintain focus for 3 years straight. From DATAllegro to Parallel Data Warehouse to Hadoop to Analytics Platform System to Azure SQL Data Warehouse to Azure Synapse Analytics to Big Data Clusters, there’s something broken about the leadership vision here. I feel sorry for folks who have to sell Microsoft data warehousing with a straight face: before the deployment finishes, the product’s already been “reinvented” again.

At the same time, I’m also so happy to be working in the relational database space. The language is stable, the product is stable, and I don’t have to tell clients to keep changing the way they access the database. Thank goodness for that.

9:05AM: Hmm, I thought the keynote started at 9, but they’re still running promo videos. Hmm.

9:09AM: Okay, I think this is actually supposed to be the keynote – they’re showing videos of people interacting with AI.

9:10AM: Satya Nadella took the stage and talked about his first Microsoft developer conference. He flashed back through big moments in computer history like The Mother of All Demos, the PC, client/server computing, etc. “All of this has been one continuous journey.” And a hell of a ride it’s been so far.

9:13AM: Satya called ChatGPT’s launch the Mosaic moment of this generation. I think that’s fair, but I had to chuckle – few people remember Mosaic. It was an early thing that’s long since been discarded by the wayside. If that happens to OpenAI, Microsoft is gonna be pissed about their multi-billion investment.

9:15AM: “We’re gonna have 50+ announcements, but I want to highlight 5 of them.”

  1. Bringing Bing to ChatGPT. (No claps.) Satya: “You can clap.” (Claps, awkward)
  2. Windows Copilot. I don’t think Cortana ever did that well on Windows desktops – at least, I never see anybody using it – so it makes sense to throw something else at it instead. For corporate PCs with security lockdown, this gives Microsoft another O365 revenue stream, because I’m sure they’ll offer a “secure” Copilot that doesn’t use your documents for training.
  3. Copilot stack. So other folks can build Copilot for their own infrastructure using Microsoft’s models and AI infrastructure. Totally makes sense given Microsoft’s developer focus – if they can make this easy in Visual Studio, then it stands a chance. I was just horrified by the demo, though: using Copilot in Office, taking legal advice from ChatGPT in Word. I can’t imagine how that might backfire. (Who the hell thought this was a good idea for a demo?!?)
  4. Azure AI Safety. Testing, provenance, and deployment.
  5. Microsoft Fabric. “The biggest data product announcement since SQL Server.” Unified storage and compute, unified experience, unified governance, and unified business model.

9:32AM: Microsoft Fabric looks like a data lake where you have a team who governs what goes in & out, regulates the schema and security, tracks the data lineage, and curates the data model. So, uh, a data warehouse?

9:35AM: Satya’s doing human storytelling, so I’ll focus on Fabric for a second here. Fabric is a story about what happens when your data is well-controlled. That was the story of the data warehouse 20 years ago: it solved exactly the same pain points. Data warehouses fell out of favor because there was too much data, changing too quickly, and the tools changed too quickly.

Data lakes became popular because people wanted to just dump the data somewhere and figure things out later. Over time, that ran into the same problems that we used to have before data warehouses: the data wasn’t reliable, we didn’t know where it came from, the changes kept breaking reports, etc. So now, Microsoft Fabric is fixing the same problem with data lakes that data warehouses fixed with scattered relational databases.

Will it catch on? Maybe – data warehouses did – but you can fast forward and see what’s going to happen when Fabric is popular. Users will say, “I have this extra data that I need to join to my reports right now, and I don’t have the time to wait for the Microsoft Fabric admins to bring it in, so I’m just going to put it in this one place for now…”

And we’re right back where we started. Okay. If your company couldn’t fix the data warehouse’s problem, and they added data lakes, and they couldn’t fix those problems, so now they’re implementing Microsoft Fabric… I’m just gonna say maybe the problem isn’t the product you’re using.

Does that mean Fabric is a bad product? Not at all – it might be great – but it’s definitely not something I’m going to pursue.

9:40AM: Kevin Scott, CTO & EVP of AI at Microsoft, took the stage to talk about the era of the AI copilot for the next half-hour. That’s a great topic, but it’s not really my jam, so I’m going to stop the live blog here. Right now, Build’s session catalog doesn’t have any Fabric sessions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sessions got added over the next hour or two. I’m not going to dig more deeply into there either.

Update: Optimistic Afternoon Thoughts

When I walked away from the computer and emptied the dishwasher (true story), I realized I wasn’t being completely fair to Fabric. There are companies who:

  1. Successfully implemented a secure, well-documented, rigid data warehouse, and
  2. Who also implemented Azure Data Lakes later, and
  3. Now want to control those lakes the same way they control their data warehouse

And for companies like that, Fabric makes a lot of sense. I don’t have a sense for how big or small that market is today, but I’m sure it’s out there – it’s the kind of thing Microsoft BI consultants would facilitate.

I think this also plays to Microsoft’s strengths: they control the cloud, the most common relational databases, the reporting tools, and the development tools. You could make an argument that Fabric stitches those pieces together in a way that Amazon and Google won’t be able to do for years, if ever. (Sure, AWS has Redshift, but that’s just a persistence layer – Microsoft is trying to argue that Fabric is a cohesive unit that brings it all together.)

Paul Turley’s a BI pro who specializes in the kind of market that Fabric services, and he has a quick summary here, plus a list of learning resources. Note the number of different tools involved in his posts and the links – Fabric isn’t just “one thing”, it’s a brand name for a whole bunch of moving parts that have been flying under different brand names over the last few years. Fabric feels like the latest brand name and vision – and that’s where I get nervous, seeing how Microsoft keeps reassembling these parts into different things.

[Video] Office Hours: Azure & SQL Server Q&A

Brent Ozar
Videos
0

Y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and I go through the top-voted ones on my Twitch channel streams.

 

Here’s what we covered today:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 01:56 Manoj: Where do you see artificial intelligence having the most impact on DBA’s?
  • 03:25 It’s ‘a me: Hi Brent, is it still “best practice” to have databases split into multiple mdf files in the days of SSDs? Especially since the files live on the same SSD
  • 04:57 Mr. SqlSeeks: Is it an accurate assumption that as SQL Server cardinality estimates improve, the query engine gets more aggressive in using those estimates to build plans, which is why some queries are awful once you change the compat level? Were the previous engine versions more forgiving?
  • 08:03 StillLearning: Hi Brent, I’m trying to understand why so many people think that using partitions with SQL Server will improve the performance of their queries. I don’t know much about Oracle, but It seems that Oracle partitions can improve some queries. Could this belief come from there?
  • 09:50 Eduardo: Should you purchase third party monitoring software for Azure SQL DB?
  • 12:24 Malmo: What’s your opinion of simultaneously using both bitlocker and SQL TDE to protect SQL data?
  • 13:23 marcus-the-german: Hi Brent, let’s say I have a AG, which is setup correctly to read the data from the secondary (the routing is correct, not the network routing ;-)), the app is configured to read from the secondary. If so, should I see the select statements in the secondary’s activity monitor?
  • 14:41 Stimpy: What are the top challenges that versionless SQL server poses to the first responder kit?
  • 16:48 Janus: See lots of videos for SQL on linux but does this feature really get used all that much?
  • 17:26 Leif: On a really wide table where users search on every column, will it be best to use column store index? Or will tables with a lot of rows gain the most from CS index?
  • 19:52 Going_Parallel: Brent, How do you best prevent yourself from “burning out”, and recognizing when you need to take a step back? Relevant for all job, but certainly in our field.
  • 23:25 Nortzi: Hi Brent. I’ve heard from you and from others that it’s a really bad idea to shrink your data files. Other than causing index fragmentation are there other compelling reasons not to do this?
  • 24:30 David Singleton: Hi Brent, thanks for sharing, your recorded classes are a bargain and have saved my butt many times now. Is there some way in an SSMS query to tell it which SQL server to connect to? Something like the SERVER equivalent of how USE works to tell it which DATABASE to use.
  • 28:07 m2devdotnet: Random, non-SQL related question – do you have any pictures of your office layout? We’re moving into our new house and I like your setup and curious what the overall layout is
  • 30:53 Y?mò: How should DBAs describe what they do for a living to non technical peeps?

[Video] Office Hours: Professional Development & Training Questions

Brent Ozar
Videos
0

A lot of today’s questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento have a common theme, but it’s just a coincidence:

Here’s what we covered:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 07:40 Maciej: Hi Brent, when you are working on the course/training how do you know that the current version is “good enough”? I am asking because my friend has a tendency to spend an enormous amount of time (or even worse – not finishing it) when he is working to prepare a presentation?
  • 10:22 Alex: I need to upgrade SQL VMs (SQL16 Compt Lvl 14). I want to upgrade to SQL22 and keep CL as is. My manager doesn’t want to make too many changes at once (stay on 16), upgrade is complex and I think that if we don’t move to 2022 now we will never do. Does it worth the fight?
  • 12:07 gringomalbec: Hi Brent, In my opinion SQL Server really shines when it comes to Columnstore Indexes. And this is not my friend’s opinion – you know what I mean 🙂 I’m familiar with your Fundamentals as well as Nico blog site. But is there any chance that you write more blog posts about it ?
  • 13:47 Champaign DBA: The dev team has created new pages in an app where every column of a display can be filtered/sorted. There are only 10 columns, but that’s 1024 index combos. Other than guesses based on selectivity and using the DEATH method post release, any tips on indexing this nightmare?
  • 17:05 GuaroSQL: I have a db with 1.5 Tb of data, 1.2 Tb of the size is just one table, it is possible store that table in another file group and try to restart that table? I can’t delete data from there
  • 18:18 Ron Howe: Is there any way to live-debug a SQL Server that is 100% CPU throttled due to bad query plan (MAXDOP) such that you can’t get a connection to it?
  • 19:16 ALSO_I_ALSO_WANT_A_FERRARI: Hello, I’m from Eastern Europe and work as a SQL Developer. I am looking for ways to get a job in either US or UK, where a junior’s salary is double to what a mid-level developer is getting here. I would be happy to get advice on where to look, and how to get such a job. Thanks!
  • 21:53 Mark M: I recently started at a new place (6 months ago) been working digging thru their DB’s ,, and have found they have like 10 views that just pull from openrowset. Seems like static data, but I am worried about security,, what are your thoughts?
  • 22:42 Piotr: You mentioned Qwest Toad for SQL Server. Besides Service Broker configuration, what things do you feel it does better than SSMS?
  • 23:13 Miguel: Is manager bias against remote DBA’s a legit concern? If so, how should you deal with it?
  • 25:04 Anatoli: What are the pros / cons of running SQL business logic in a SQL Agent Job vs a scheduled Windows task? Who should have access to create new agent jobs?
  • 28:04 Magnús: Enjoy your intro music, what genre is that? Where do you get it?
  • 29:09 Janus: Which blog engines have you used? What is your favorite?
  • 29:19 Mr. M: Hi, Will Azure SQL put DBAs out of jobs?
  • 31:16 The Pink Poodle: What white boarding tool do you like to use with remote clients?
  • 31:53 gserdijn: Hello Brent, can you tell our friends and me what the most important differences between running a database in SQL Server 2022 with Compatlevel 2019 and running a database in SQL Server 2019 are? We want to upgrade from 2017 but are not comfortable with 2022 yet.
  • 33:21 gotqn: Any risk of using master database objects like [master]..[spt_values] in production routines?
  • 34:03 Sean C: Hi Brent, after my friend broke up a query into two using a union all (accounting for them dang NULLs) so it is more sargable, they are seeing a distinct sort operator before the last concatenation and select. There is no order by and no distinct in the query. Any insight?
  • 37:15 Eduardo: Do you have any recommended tools for comparing two SQL Server instances (not DB’s) to quickly show where they are not configured identically (configuration drift)?
  • 38:08 Dean: If someone wanted to become the Brent Ozar for Postgresql what advice would you give them.

[Video] Office Hours: 45 Minutes of SQL Server Q&A

Brent Ozar
Videos
3 Comments

It’s a long one, folks! I went through almost 30 of your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento to get your learn on:

 

Here’s what we covered:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 00:30 Jr Wannabe DBA: Hi Brent, recently you talked about linters; do you recommend any for T-SQL? I tried a few randomly from Google search, they are useless.
  • 04:55 Rajiv: What is the best way to read JSON in sql?
  • 06:07 not Kevin Mitnick: (I ask all my colleagues do your courses) What percentage of your clients use TDE vs Always Encrypted vs Nothing? Except your survey, there seems to be no public data on usage. I have seen hacks that demonstrate how to crack TDE. Always Encrypted seems the right way to go.
  • 06:56 ProochingMan: Is your Office Hours podcast still available anywhere? I used to enjoy listening to you, Kendra, and others discuss SQL Server – including older episodes. I haven’t been able to stream/download it with me podcast aggregator for a while, and I am not finding them on your site.
  • 07:46 Benji: What is your opinion of using Azure SMB File Shares to host SQL Server data files?
  • 09:02 Don’t Be Afraid: Hi Brent, maybe a loaded question that you will rip into me for. But how bad is spilling to tempdb for sorts? Not having any issues, just looking to understand! Thank you!
  • 11:36 Eduardo: Is the cost / complexity of SQL DAG vs AG ever worth it? Do you get to work on DAG with your clients?
  • 16:10 marcus-the-german: Hi Brent, I have a table A with a nvarchar(255) column. It’s filled with data. If I query the data type I see a max_length of 510 bytes in the sys.columns table for this column in my table A. What’s the big deal about it?
  • 16:45 Dollop: What’s a good book to learn query tuning ?
  • 18:02 carpediem: Hello, do you have some book or link recommendations for implementing Hit-Highlighting with fulltext search?
  • 19:08 Vishnu: What is your opinion of agreeing to automatically send SQL mini dumps to Microsoft?
  • 20:26 Piotr: Is it ok to patch SQL Cumulative Updates and Windows Updates at the same time or should they be done separately?
  • 21:41 reporting_developer_dba: Can modifying indexes and using date as a first column will be advantages so we can use between to pull data in range vs reading pages by ID’s?
  • 22:20 Benji: What is your opinion of third party HADR solutions for SQL Server such as SIOS DataKeeper?
  • 24:23 Mariángel: Have you ever seen Windows filter drivers cause data corruption in SQL Server? What are your tips for preventing data corruption from filter drivers?
  • 25:07 Boris: It is easy / hard working in both SQL Server and PostgreSQL?
  • 27:10 TJ: Hi Brent, how would you go about troubleshooting a query that runs forever and you can’t get its actual execution plan?
  • 29:35 TY: Hi, do you think that performance in SQL Server can be faster for one-time executions: If the engine takes time to write logs, executions plans or any other fancy stuff – is there a way to turn OFF
  • 31:35 Wren: Really hard question to google… If you have an AG-enabled server with multiple dbs on it in a WFC, do all of the dbs have to be in the AG to failover for patching, etc? Is there any reason to not put a db into an AG on an AG-enabled server?
  • 33:20 accidental_dba: what happens if run 2 instance on a 256gb RAM sever with standard edition. Does each instance get its own 128gb under 1 license and divide the cores between those
  • 34:08 SQLrage: I took your advice and tested this and found that updating all statistics with full scan alone on all tables referenced in a proc did not cause the plan to be regenerated.
  • 36:18 hammered_by_manager_to_work_on_sata_drives: if 2 similar procedures or queries run from 2 different databases, will SQL server keep plans per database or as global?
  • 37:30 Vishnu: What is your opinion of SQL ledger tables? Is this another service broker from M$ft?
  • 39:15 Sasan: Hi Brent, In your mastering class you say that it does not really matter for an equality search which leading key is indexed first. While I have found this to be true in terms of the number of reads, it could produce plans with different estimates. Any thoughts?
  • 39:45 Red Dog: What are your memories / experiences of SQL Data Services from 2008?
  • 40:30 AK: Hi Brent, When is the next sale for your courses besides the black friday one? Just fyi I did google it but I did not find the answer.
  • 42:02 Magnús: We see forward fetches from a sproc that makes heavy use of tempdb. it inserts into and update a local temp temp table before finally returning the reporting results. Is there a forward fetches threshold at which we should be concerned about performance (thousands, millions)?
  • 42:54 Programmer: What’s a reasonable progression for deploying a production database for a new project (assume negligible budget to start) as it grows for a team that shies away from managed/closed services but doesn’t have expertise in managing databases?
  • 44:07 Gabriele: if my friend had a work proposal for working some days (5-10) a month on a 24/7 on call ready schedule, what suggestion will you give him?

It’s Been 6 Months. SQL Server 2022 Still Isn’t Ready Yet. (Updated)

Brent Ozar
SQL Server 2022
29 Comments

Six months ago today, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2022 was ready.

Except it wasn’t.

And it still isn’t ready.

See, look at the very first hero in their list of 2022’s new features:

The very first one is “Business continuity through Azure – Bidirectional DR to Azure SQL.” However, buried way down in the footnotes, Microsoft admitted:

The bidirectional disaster recovery capability of the Link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance is available in limited public preview. Sign up for early access. General availability will occur at a future date.

Well, it’s been 6 months now, and that feature is still only in limited “public” preview, and by “public” I mean you have to apply through a form so the product group can onboard you. The form has some interesting questions that insinuate this thing still needs some baking, like asking how much time per week that you can work with the product group, and asks you to assess your skills:

And at the end of the form:

I applied on April 26th out of curiosity. I haven’t heard a word back.

You might say, “Well, that’s just one of the features – the rest are ready, right?” I’d disagree – the second hero feature was Azure Synapse Link, and the list of current limitations for that is horrific.

  • The table can’t use CDC, Always Encrypted, columnstore, etc
  • The database can’t have transactional replication
  • The database can’t be involved in Azure SQL Managed Instance Link – meaning the very first two hero features can’t even work together

Should you install SQL Server 2022? I think as long as you stay clear of the new features, you’re fine. The new version gets you query performance improvements (especially for Enterprise Edition users) and longer supportability.

But if you want to use these new features, SQL Server 2022 just still isn’t ready.

So next week at Microsoft Build, when you hear folks making grand announcements of upcoming features, just remember that they still haven’t delivered on last year’s “released” features! Take announcements with a grain of salt: until it’s actually in your hands, it’s vaporware. It bums me out to have to say that out loud, but here we are.

Update 2022-05-17: another not-done feature

A reader pointed out to me that Query Store on readable replicas was supposed to be a SQL Server 2022 feature, and that one’s still not done yet after 6 months, either, as the documentation points out:

Update 2023-11-18: still not ready.

At the Microsoft Ignite and PASS Data Community Summit conferences, Microsoft proudly announced that the online disaster recovery between SQL Server 2022 and Managed Instances is getting closer – but… it’s still only in preview. It’s amazing to me that even a year after its release, SQL Server 2022’s flagship feature still isn’t ready yet.

Needless to say, Microsoft didn’t unveil anything about vNext at those conferences – because they can’t. They’re still working on getting SQL Server 2022 out the door.

Here’s to 2024 being the year that SQL Server 2022 is finally ready.

How to Configure Ola Hallengren’s Database Maintenance Scripts for Backups

Brent Ozar
Backup and Recovery
16 Comments

Someone told you that you should be using Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Scripts. You’ve downloaded his Maintenance Solution.sql, you ran it in the master database, and … now you’re not sure what’s supposed to happen next. In this post, we’ll cover how to configure backups.

First, configure the Agent jobs.

When MaintenanceSolution.sql ran, it created a few Agent jobs. You can see them in SSMS or Azure Data Studio under SQL Server Agent, Jobs:

Ola created those jobs, but didn’t configure or schedule them, because they need information specific to your environment. In this post, we’re only going to focus on the DatabaseBackup jobs.

We’ll start with DatabaseBackup – SYSTEM_DATABASES – FULL. This job backs up your master, model, and msdb databases, which sounds really simple, but it’s a good place to start because even a job this simple needs configuration. Right-click on the job, click Properties, Steps, then click on the only step in the job and click Edit.

Here’s what the job does by default:

A couple of those parameters need explanation and configuration.

@Directory = NULL means that Ola uses the default backup path for your server. To see what that is, right-click on your server in SSMS or ADS, go into Properties, Database Settings, and it’s the “Database default locations” here:

That backup path may not be what you want, so change it at the server level in this screenshot, not in Ola’s jobs. Just change it once at the server level, and it’ll take effect everywhere in any script that doesn’t specify where the backups should go.

Side note – I prefer writing backups to a UNC path, like \\backuptarget\foldername, rather than local storage, and here’s why.

While you’re in that screen, look up just a little, and you’ll see two other checkboxes:

  • Compress Backup – check that so your backups run faster, and
  • Backup Checksum – check that so SQL Server does a little bit of corruption checking while it’s doing the backups (this won’t slow your backups down)

Once you’ve configured those server-level settings, let’s go back to that Ola job step. Leave the @Directory parameter null, and it’ll inherit the server-level backup path. Next parameter…

@Verify = ‘Y’ means that after the database backup finishes, SQL Server will do a test restore to make sure the backup file is valid. That sounds good, but it makes your backup jobs take way longer, and it hurts performance of other stuff while it runs. If you want to verify your backups, you’re much better off restoring them onto a different server. Me, I recommend changing this to @Verify = ‘N’. You can edit it right there onscreen.

@CleanupTime = NULL means that this job won’t delete old backup files. If you would like old backups deleted, replace NULL with the number of hours for older files to be deleted. (3 days is 72 hours, 1 week is 168 hours. You’re welcome. I suck at math too.)

We’re done configuring the step. Click OK, then click Notifications, and it’ll look like this:

I dunno about you, but I wanna know when things go bump in the night, so click the Email checkbox and choose the group that you want to be notified when the job fails. If that dropdown is empty, here’s how to configure database mail. Note that you’ll need to do that, then restart SQL Server Agent, before you can come back to finish configuring these scripts.

Last up, click Schedules. You’ll notice there’s no schedule:

It’s up to you to define the schedules for each job. Click New. If you want them backed up every night at 8PM, for example, here’s how you’d set up that screen:

Don’t schedule all backups simultaneously.

Folks seem to default all of their severs to run backups at midnight.

That’s a terrible idea.

Because then at 23:59:59, all of your servers are staring at their Apple Watches, waiting for the exact moment to simultaneously bum-rush the storage and the network. The lights in the datacenter will suddenly dim, fans will scream, and all of the servers will do a distributed denial of service attack on themselves.

Instead, stagger your schedules out as much as you can. If you’re reading this post to learn this topic, then you have four jobs that likely want to run every night: system database backups, user database backups, index optimization, and integrity checks. Those four jobs, across all your servers, should be spread out as much as possible.

The good news is that the system database full backups will be super quick because the system databases are small. Just pick a time when user activity has tapered off for the day. Odds are, you’re never going to need to restore a system database, so I’m less concerned with the exact time of day on these. (Plus, we can’t do transaction log backups on these.) The biggest reason I back these databases up is that people accidentally create objects in the system databases, and then ask me to restore ’em.

After configuring the job’s schedule, click OK, and we’re done configuring the system backups!

OMG, that was a lot of work.
Next up, the user database backups.

The user database jobs are a little more complex. There are separate jobs and schedules for full, differential, and transaction log backups. I’m not going to cover the differences between those here, but I am going to talk about the most common parameters that you’ll want to set on each of the jobs. This is above and beyond the parameters we discussed above, which also need to be set on user database jobs.

Ola’s DatabaseBackup stored proc has a lot of parameters that don’t show up in the default jobs, but I think you should set them.

@ChangeBackupType = ‘Y’ should be added to your list of parameters. What this does is if a brand new database gets added to your server midday, and your transaction log backup job runs, the log backup job will say, “Hey, I can’t do a log backup because there hasn’t been a full backup of this brand new database yet – so I’m going to change the backup type to full for this database.” This gets you coverage right from the get-go when new databases are created in full recovery model.

@NumberOfFiles = 4 should be added for performance on the full backup job. SQL Server backups go faster when they’re striped across multiple files due to SQL Server’s own internal limitations, nothing to do with your storage. If you want to spend time performance tuning, you may find that 6 or 8 backup files might even improve performance more, but for starters, let’s at least do 4 files. It doesn’t require any more work on your part, even at restore time, because you’re going to use DatabaseRestore, an automated tool, for your restores.

@MinBackupSizeForMultipleFiles = 10000 should be added so that we only mess with multiple backup files when the database is 10GB or larger. Smaller than that, I’m not really concerned about backup performance – 1 file should be fine.

There are many, many more backup parameters you can set for things like encryption, third party backup software, parallel backup jobs, and performance tuning, but those 3 are the most important, and the ones I usually set everywhere. So here’s what my “full” step looks like, for example:

Schedule these backup jobs as well – typically once a day for the full backup job, and every 5 minutes (or every minute, really) for the log backup job.

Finally, test the backups by running a restore.

After the backup jobs run, you’ll end up with files organized in this folder structure:
\ServerName\DatabaseName\FULL
\ServerName\DatabaseName\DIFF
\ServerName\DatabaseName\LOG

That might seem awkward if you’re used to using the GUI to point-and-click your way through database restores. Fortunately, there’s a really easy solution for that: sp_DatabaseRestore, a free stored procedure in our open source First Responder Kit. To restore a database to the most recent point-in-time, you can run:

That’ll automatically pull the most recent full backup from that folder, plus all the transaction logs since, and restore them in order. Easy, right? Super helpful when you want to keep a development or QA server up to date. There are more parameters for things like differential backups, moving data files, running CHECKDB, and more – for those, hit the documentation.

One of the many reasons why you’ll want to back up directly to a network path is so that you can run restores from other servers without slowing down production. Test your restores on other environments, like your DR or dev/QA/test environments, and you’ll know with confidence that your newly created backup jobs are working well.

For support questions on how the scripts work, visit the #SQLhelp channel in the SQL Server community Slack – invites available here – or post questions on DBA.StackExchange.com or the SQLServerCentral forums. Do not leave support questions here in the comments – I’ll simply ignore them since you didn’t read the post through to the end. However, if you’ve got questions about the parameters or process above, feel free to leave those and I’ll work through ’em.

[Video] Office Hours: Testing the First Responder Kit

Brent Ozar
Videos
0

I tested the April release of the FRK, then answered your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

 

Here’s what we covered:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 28:37 Make_a_car_and_call_it_a_Brentley: Hi Brent, thanks for everything you do for the community. I was wondering on your opinion on using RegEx within a SQLquery and it’s performance. We have queries where we analyse about 2 million rows with usually a good 30-50 %something% values to search for.
  • 30:18 Koritt: Hi Brent. DBCC CHECKDB runs CHECKALLOC, CHECKTABLE, and CHECKCATALOG against a DB. Would running each call separately (eg: to spread CHECKTABLE over time for large DBs) give the same level of validation as CHECKDB, or does CHECKDB do additional checks the individual calls do not?
  • 31:42 Piotr: For patching purposes, is it safe to simply reboot a SQL Server FCI after patching or should you always shut down the SQL Server agent and SQL Server instance prior to rebooting? Hoping to avoid data corruption.
  • 32:44 Fellow Early Riser: Does your early to rise cause early to bed? Have you always been an early riser?
  • 33:20 Tom: Hi Brent, Have you ever encountered a database that hasn’t been designed properly and wasn’t normalized? If you have, how did you deal / react to the situation?
  • 35:00 Carnac: Enjoyed watching you evaluate each DBA’s top SQL wait stats. Can we look forward to a future episode of this?
  • 35:33 Benji: Is there consideration for bringing constant care to PostgreSQL? What is the hassle / reward ratio for this?
  • 37:16 TJ: We’re experiencing constant deadlocks with xp_userlock calls within sp_getApplock. Do you have recommendations for how to improve the deadlocks?
  • 38:59 Jon: How was Iceland?

Free Webcast Next Week! What’s New (and Actually Good) in SQL Server 2022

Brent Ozar
SQL Server 2022
7 Comments

It’s May 2023, and believe it or not, some of the flagship features in Microsoft’s latest version still aren’t ready for prime time yet. Good news, though: there are a few things that genuinely make your life easier with minimal work required on your part.

Forget rewriting code, though – in this session, I’ll show what to turn on to determine:

  • When to migrate to SQL Server 2022
  • What metrics to watch
  • Which dials to turn to make SQL Server faster

The first 200 folks to register and attend will get a $10 gift card for lunch, and participants who attend and participate will be entered into a random drawing for a JBL Clip speaker. The webcast will also be recorded, and registrants will be emailed the link to the recording.

Register here.

[Video] Office Hours: 25 Pretty Good Questions

Brent Ozar
Videos
1 Comment

You post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see, and my job is to come up with accurate answers on the fly. Let’s see how I did.

Here’s what we discussed:

  • 00:00 Start
  • 03:25 SickOf: Brent is there a backup product you can recommend?
  • 04:38 OneEyebrowRaised: I’m noticing three significant shortfalls in Always On: 1) Login synchronization is manual, 2) Scheduled Jobs synchronization is all manual, 3) stored procedures put in the system databases aren’t shared across nodes. Do you know of any tools to address these shortcomings?
  • 06:11 Sean C: Hi Brent, TIA for roasting me lol. We use dynamic SQL to loop through 200+ cols to validate against a set of specs, resulting in a lot of plans being painted when tuning. Is there a way to suppress benign exec plans like looping through commands, etc to reduce bloat?
  • 07:47 I’ll be BacH: Is Data Modeler still a career path? Or has that merged into Database Developer? Do you see any sub-specialties in the Database Developer career field?
  • 10:05 Doug: Do folks ask easily Googled questions intentionally?
  • 11:11 Isaac Wahnon: You answered Rojo about using Distributed AGs for version upgrades, saying “No because it’s so much work to set up.”We want to upgrade from 2019 to 22,What upgrade procedure can reduce risk and downtime for a system with AGs and Distributed AGs? In-place or replace.
  • 12:27 macfergusson: Hey Brent, in one of your courses you mention using GUID PKs and clustered indexes, they aren’t nearly the bad choice that a lot of DBAs make it out to be. If you do go this route, are there any different best practices that you recommend? Fillfactor, extra memory?
  • 13:11 JediMindGorilla: Hi Brent. I always tell people “I am not the guy that can code a cup of coffee from 0, I am the guy that makes it taste better”… is it common to have people looking for SQL jobs that may not have as much “coding” experience (code from scratch), but are good at performance?
  • 15:15 Sammy: An architect I know likes to default every Primary Key INT with -2,147,483,648 or BIGINT and its lowest to avoid resizing. Brilliant or needlessly clever?
  • 15:57 Accidental_dba: Can we run multiple backups on a single server as we have 100+ databases? Currently we use olaha scripts. Currently backups starts at 12am and finishes around 7am which is when all our stores open? Trying to make backups finishes by 5am
  • 18:18 Just_Winging_It: Brent, In your experience, when you rebuild indexes and fragmentation is still present, what are the usual suspects to check? Please feel free to roast me.
  • 19:14 gjocarroll (George): Hi Brent, have you encountered any new entry into your Top 5 Waitstats/issues in the last few years/SQL Server versions?
  • 20:35 Universe For Rent: I’m often tasked to review SQL code that’s about to be pushed to production.
  • 22:04 ArchibeaR: Been working with SQL Server since 6.5…. I know i’m old. Working with a new team building Azure setup from the beginning. Wondering if you have some suggestions on reading to get upto speed.
  • 22:46 Developer Who Cosplays As a DBA: I recently ran into compilation timeouts in a prod database that caused web pages to time out, and I’d love to put together a demo of comp. timeouts for educational purposes. Do you have any tips for how you would go about intentionally writing a query with a long compile time?
  • 23:45 Ive_Got_Heaps: Hypothetical: Brent decides to sell all of his cars (see hypothetical) to fund a new database engine. What are your dream bells and whistles? Sub question, when can I invest?
  • 25:18 Piotr: What’s the largest server you have seen log shipped? Any issues with shipping large servers?
  • 27:15 core: hey Brent! Is there any easy way to detect SQL Server Agent missed jobs? For example, if the SQL Server Agent is stopped due to an issue with the service, server, or planned maintenance. thanks!
  • 27:14 Guilty DBA: Hi Brent, is there any way to configure the querystore (QS) to handle identical Pans more efficiently ?
  • 29:21 Yevgeny: How far back in SQL versions does office hours go back? Has the format / content / hairstyle of office hours changed much since then?
  • 30:54 Haydar: Is there a good way to programmatically obtain the query hash / query plan hash of a query after execution for auditing purposes?
  • 31:40 Eduardo: How do you recommend implementing sproc debug logging when the sproc could be running on AG primary or AG readonly secondary node?
  • 32:40 Wren: Hi Brent! Do you think the noted 2019 query/performance slowdown might patched any time “soon” (next year or so)? Or is it just too “baked in” to the version?
  • 34:25 Jessica: Hey Brent, I’m going to be in Vegas for a tech conference in about a month. What’s a good local restaurant or coffee shop that are just amazing to go to that are away from the “tourist” areas
  • 35:58 GP Geek: How do you get more than 8k or 4k into an NVARCHAR or VARCHAR variable? I’ve had a recent case where the limit was reached without the user noticing it and missing data

Happy 21st Anniversary, BrentOzar.com. What’s Coming Next?

Brent Ozar
Company News
18 Comments

It’s pretty cool to look at a blog post and see, “Last updated: 21 years ago.”

It’s pretty fun to see old pictures of me in the media library, too.

When I first started blogging over two decades ago, it wasn’t a business. I just did it because I enjoyed writing, sharing, and being part of an online community. It was a fun outlet, a way to contribute something in my spare time, and a method to record my life in a way that might enable me to look back later and see what I’d been doing years ago.

For example, 20 years ago:

By 15 years ago, I had already started to focus mostly on SQL Server:

By 10 years ago, BrentOzar.com was a full-fledged business. The blog posts not only targeted tech exclusively, but the post titles were now aware of the importance of search engine optimization:

By 5 years ago, we were deeply focused on technical SQL Server issues, but also covered technologies relevant to the DBA space:

Of course I have a straight face under here, why do you ask?

Over the last few years, during the pandemic and up to today, I focused a lot of the blog content on live streams & recorded videos.

I wanted to give people a community where they could see a friendly face – even when the world wasn’t open for business, and faces were covered with masks. Database work is often lonely because so many of us are the only person in our company who does what we do, and the pandemic and remote work only made those things tougher. Many of the data professionals I know are struggling with burnout and loneliness.

Those of us who’ve been lucky enough to be around other people again, whether it’s work-related stuff or friends, have started to recover. Free regional in-person events like SQL Saturdays and Data Saturdays are starting to come back to life, and big ones like SQLBits and the PASS Summit offer hope that we’ll be able to do family reunions on a more regular basis again.

However, the data community is like a river: you can never step in the same river twice. Not only have the places and ways we meet up changed, but the members of the community have changed, too. Over a decade, many of us transition to different adjacent technologies, different lines of work, or switch to management.

I took December-February off to step back and think about what I personally wanted to do next, too. Was it time for me to transition? Had I done everything there was to do in Microsoft’s relational database engine, and was it time to move on? (I certainly don’t know everything in Microsoft’s data stack altogether – the product list is huge, as is the depth of each product.)

I came to the conclusion that it was time to go back to the start, and take a fresh look at Azure SQL DB and SQL Server. The products are still widely used, and every day, more people start using them for the first time. I’m not aiming to teach new things to folks who’ve read the blog for the last 20 years – but rather, teach things in fun, friendly new ways, helping people solve database problems faster.

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for April 2023

Brent Ozar
First Responder Kit Updates
3 Comments

This month’s big changes are performance tuning in sp_BlitzFirst & sp_BlitzLock.

Part of the benefits of using the open source FRK is that when any of us work with *really* big/fast/ugly servers, we tune the FRK procs to work better in those environments – which means it’ll likely work better in yours, too. For example, this month I was working with a server doing 30k-35k queries/sec and hitting threadpool issues, and I wanted sp_BlitzFirst to return more quickly in that kind of environment, so I tuned it.

How I Use the First Responder Kit
Wanna watch me use it? Take the class.

To get the new version:

Consultant Toolkit Changes

I updated it to this month’s First Responder Kit, but no changes to querymanifest.json or the spreadsheet. If you’ve customized those, no changes are necessary this month: just copy your spreadsheet and querymanifest.json into the new release’s folder.

sp_Blitz Changes

sp_BlitzFirst Changes

  • Enhancement: new @OutputResultSets parameter lets you return less result sets when you’re in a hurry. (#3255)
  • Enhancement: performance tuning for faster response time on systems with thousands of simultaneous active queries. (#3257)
  • Fix: no more arithmetic overflow on queries with horrific row estimates. (#3241, thanks SQLLambert.)
  • Fix: remove @@ROWCOUNT to avoid problems with In-Memory OLTP. (#3237)
  • Fix: only alert on bad cardinality estimations for queries that run > 5 seconds. (#3253)

sp_BlitzLock Changes

sp_BlitzWho Changes

  • Fix: no more date errors when a request’s start date is 1900. (#3243, thanks Jeff Mosu.)

sp_DatabaseRestore Changes

  • Enhancement: new @FileExtensionDiff parameter for folks who want to name their differential backup extensions different than Ola’s defaults. (#3234, thanks Will Spurgeon.)

For Support

When you have questions about how the tools work, talk with the community in the #FirstResponderKit Slack channel. Be patient: it’s staffed by volunteers with day jobs. If it’s your first time in the community Slack, get started here.

When you find a bug or want something changed, read the contributing.md file.

When you have a question about what the scripts found, first make sure you read the “More Details” URL for any warning you find. We put a lot of work into documentation, and we wouldn’t want someone to yell at you to go read the fine manual. After that, when you’ve still got questions about how something works in SQL Server, post a question at DBA.StackExchange.com and the community (that includes me!) will help. Include exact errors and any applicable screenshots, your SQL Server version number (including the build #), and the version of the tool you’re working with.

Brent Ozar

Hi! I’m Brent Ozar.

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. I’m based out of Las Vegas. He/him. I teach SQL Server training classes, or if you haven’t got time for the pain, I’m available for consulting too.

Want to advertise here and reach my savvy readers?