Routine health assessment, risk identification, and operational readiness.
42 associated posts42 primary posts
When we built SQL ConstantCare® as a mentoring - not monitoring - product, I really meant the word mentoring.
A lot of us are loners - the only SQL Server person in the office. Nobody really understands what we're doing, and ... we're not even sure we understand, either. We were self-taught, and we didn't have anybody around to bounce ideas off of.
This week, Brent and Richie discuss using full-text index, Elasticsearch, server restart issues, sp_blitzfirst, Always On availability groups, issues with users connecting to SQL Server, learning the basics of Python on SQL Server 2017, VMWare Hyper-V configuration issue, and more.
Here’s the video on YouTube:
Pumpkin Spice
When I'm looking at someone's server, it's easy to tell the kind of care it's been under.
We've written a lot about servers that have gotten the wrong kind of care. You know, no backups, no checkdb, but someone managed to turn auto create stats off for every database, and enable affinity masking. That's not what I'm here to talk about today.
This isn't about having a sucky job, this is about you sucking at your job. There's a big difference. You could be sucking at your job because you hate your job and just don't care. I get that. In that case though, you know better but choose not to do better.
I've encountered some people that have Senior DBA as their job title but don't really have senior-level experience. I've seen some very questionable things in my career.
Signs you aren't a Senior DBA
Your boss or client came to you and said, "Give me a quick health check on this SQL Server." Step 1: Download & run sp_Blitz. Go to our download page and get our First Responder Kit. There's a bunch of scripts and white papers in there, but the one to start with is sp_Blitz.sql. Open…
How bizarre
So there's this funny thing about SQL Server: many units of measure boil down to 8k pages. That's the size of a data page, so when you measure reads, or size, sometimes the only thing you can do is convert that to MB or GB, or if you're super lucky, TB.
This week, Angie, Erik, Doug, Jessica, and Richie discuss DB migration, rebuilding large indexes, recommendation for SQL dev ops tools, best practices for disabling SA accounts, compression, and more!
Here’s the video on YouTube:
You have a monitoring tool, but you've set up an email rule to dump all the alerts into a folder.
You're not particularly proud of that, but it is what it is. You're just tired of the spam.
Even with lots of monitoring in place, we should perform periodic checks of our SQL Servers.
Think of this like "Spring Cleaning", except I would recommend that it be more frequently than just once a year. Doing it monthly might be a bit ambitious due to our busy schedules, but quarterly could be achievable.
I saw a DBA.StackExchange.com question and had to laugh out loud:
"Is there a cool way of performing CU updates for SQL Server on hundreds of machines?"
No, and it has nothing to do with technology.
I've touched a lot of SQL Servers over the years. After my share of trips to HR for inappropriate touching, here's the questions I ask first these days: Is this in production now? If this goes down, what apps go down with it? When those apps go down, is there potential for loss of life…
I started tweeting various single-words you could start an argument with the other day. I really liked this suggestion from @SQL_Kiwi:
https://twitter.com/SQL_Kiwi/status/550126918503108609
We've all found those databases. They're on your production SQL Server instance, but nobody seems to know if they're being used, or what's using them.
You could run some sort of trace, but you'd probably drag down performance on your SQL Server. What you need is a quicker way to find out if the database is in use.
Is a Login Using the database?
And if so, what query did they run last? My favorite way to see this is with Adam Machanic's sp_whoisactive.
You've been working with SQL Server for a couple of years, but you're not really sure what's going on in the System Databases folder. What gets stored in Master, Model, and MSDB? What processes use them? In the event of a crash, should you restore them? Brent Ozar will give you an introductory tour in this half-hour video:
We write a lot about best practices, we teach customers best practices, and we publish popular references for best practices about all sorts of things like performance monitoring, SQL Server Setup, and Availability Groups. But the internet is a sea of information and many SQL Server instances have unique needs. How does a SQL developer…
Some parts of our jobs are not glamorous, but necessary. For example, I have to brush Brent’s Bob Dylan wig weekly, to make sure it’s shiny and perfect. Documentation is a task many people roll their eyes at, procrastinate about starting, have a hard time keeping up-to-date, and in general avoid.
Stop avoiding it, and embrace the benefits!
It's crucial for database administrators to recognize signs of pending doom. Make sure you're able to quickly spot problems in SQL Server Management Studio by studying these screenshots.
What's that? You can't see the differences in the screenshots? That's because SQL Server Management Studio doesn't show you serious problems.
When an application is offline or performing so badly that the users are complaining, what do you turn to?
When your cellphone says a major incident is ongoing and you can’t get to a computer, where do you send the team at the office?
Paul Randal (Blog - @PaulRandal) nailed a blog post to the church wall entitled, "What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of?" His choices included auto-shrink, putting databases in full recovery by default, GUIDs as clustered indexes, and more. He tagged me, and I knew right away what I'd say. 5. IntelliSense restrictions on…
I had sworn to myself that if I saw one more helpful article about how to shrink your SQL Server database files with DBCC SHRINKFILE or how to back up your log with TRUNCATE_ONLY, I was going to write a rant about it.
SQL Server Magazine just tweeted about their latest article, a reader-submitted solution on how to shrink your database files with ease.
