I recently got setup at home with three identical monitors as I work from home often. Here's a picture of them. The left-most monitor is my main monitor for my work laptop.
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It is easy to track database growth on a single SQL Server instance. We simply just need to store the results of sp_databases or loop through the databases and call sp_spaceused for each database.
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Microsoft has released SQL Server 2005 service pack 3 and cumulative update package 1 for service pack 3. For more information about SP3, check this out. For more information about SP3 CU1, check this out.
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Autogrowth is enabled by default for the SQL Server database files. The default setting of 10% for file growth on the database files can often times lead to poor performance, especially if you don't properly size your files for the near future.
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EDIT: There is a new version of this stored procedure.
I've made a couple of changes to my defragment indexes stored procedure, isp_ALTER_INDEX, based upon feedback I've received from my blog readers.
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There are times when I need to run some process using credentials other than my current security context, such as when my userid doesn't have permissions to a remote resource but another userid does.
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EDIT: There is a new version of this stored procedure.
I've made several changes to my backup stored procedure, isp_Backup. I fixed a few things and added some much needed features.
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Has anyone used SQL Server FineBuild before? According to the web site, it "provides 1-click install and best-practice configuration of SQL Server 2005." It doesn't mention anything about clusters though, which is what I'd be interested in as installing SQL Server on a cluster is a bit of a pain.
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SQL Profiler is a great tool that allows you to see what's going on inside SQL Server. You can find out what your worst performing queries are, how often a query is executed, and loads of other stuff.
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With hyper-threading and multi-core CPUs, it isn't easy to find out how many physical CPUs (or sockets) there are on a server. Recently we were given such a task to ensure we were properly licensed.
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This is completely off-topic, but I thought it was interesting enough to post. Microsoft "confirms" the small world theory. We are linked by 6.6 degrees of separation, which is practically the Kevin Bacon "theory".
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The most important thing that a Database Administrator does is backups. To automate them, we schedule them as jobs. But what other jobs are important on SQL Server instances?
Here are the jobs that I have on every SQL Server 2005 production instance:
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Microsoft has released three security tools to help customers with SQL injection attacks. The tools are:
UrlScan version 3.0 Beta, a security tool that restricts the types of HTTP requests that Internet Information Services (IIS) will process.
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There are many ways to transfer SQL logins between SQL Server instances. Here are a few of them: sp_help_revlogin Transfer Logins Task in a DTS package Transfer Logins Task in an SSIS package SQL Server Magazine method Manually (like that's even a consideration for an experienced DBA) In an ideal world, an application will connect to a SQL Server instance using one account (or perhaps a couple extra) and then "authenticate" individual users via application code and a SQL table.
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Every now and then, someone will ask in the SQLTeam forums how to find out what Windows users are members of a particular Windows group so that they can find out who has access to their SQL Server.
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Have you ever wondered why your msdb database is unusually large? Did you know that SQL Server keeps historical information about every backup and restore operation in the msdb database? It is recommended that you purge this backup and restore historical information on a scheduled basis.
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For the past several months, we have been overwhelmed with performance issues on one particular system. We know what is causing it, but it is going to take time to modify the code, test the changes, and then deploy to production.
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Most of you probably already have done this, but just in case you haven't and find yourself frequently using cmd to run commands such as sqlcmd, you will find this registry "hack" useful.
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We are required to start auditing our SQL Servers for various data points. We did not want to write a custom tool if at all possible, so we started looking for third-party products.
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Attention Loyal Readers,
I've updated my RSS feed to use FeedBurner. If you haven't already done so, please update your link to this one: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RamblingsOfADba
If you don't update your feed, you will be redirected to the new one.
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