This is the final blog for my PASS Summit 2011 series. Well okay, a mini-series, I guess.
On the last day of the conference, I attended Keith Elmore’ and Boris Baryshnikov’s (both from Microsoft) “Introducing the Microsoft SQL Server Code Named “Denali” Performance Dashboard Reports, Jeremiah Peschka’s (blog|twitter) “Rewrite your T-SQL for Great Good!
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Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit.
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Today I renamed the sa account on 23 SQL Server 2005/2008 instances. I used the CMS to assist with this task. Later we realized all of the SQL Agent jobs were failing on these instances with the following error: “The job failed.
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Twice a year, we move our production systems to our disaster recovery site. Last Saturday night was one of those days. There are about 50 SQL Server databases to be moved to the DR site, which is done via database mirroring.
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Recently I opened a case with Microsoft PSS to help us through a severe performance problem on a new system. As part of that case, the PSS engineer checked our “max degree of parallelism” server-side setting.
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I started my IT career as a student worker in the database team at the County of San Diego. Although I worked on many different things in that group, it launched my career as a Database Administrator.
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On Saturday (9/18), I presented "Performance Tuning with Traces" at SQL Saturday #55. There were about 65 people in attendance, and it was standing room only. As promised, you can download my presentation materials here.
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If you are interested in finding out the largest SQL projects in the world, you should check out this PowerPoint presentation. It’s from Kevin Cox of SQL CAT at Microsoft.
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Last November, I blogged about a weird bug with SQL Server 2005 on a Windows 2008 cluster. We were having issues with Database Mail and other things and learned that it was due to the server names being in lower case.
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I recently received the following email from a blog reader:
"We are having an OLTP database instance, using SQL Server 2005 with little to moderate traffic (10-20 requests/min). There are also bulk imports that occur at regular intervals in this DB and the import duration ranges between 10secs to 1 min, depending on the data size.
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I have modified isp_ALTER_INDEX, which is the stored procedure that I wrote and use to defragment/rebuild indexes in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The code change has just one bug fix.
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The SQLCAT team released a very informative whitepaper regarding backup and recovery of very large databases in SQL Server 2008. It is a must read if you are a SQL Server DBA.
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I have modified isp_Backup, which is the stored procedure that I use to backup SQL Server databases. This new version includes one bug fix and three new features:
Bug Fix – removed ReportServerTempdb from exclusion list Bug Fix – fixed file retention code to handle database names with spaces Feature – support for SQL Server 2008 including compression Feature – archive bit option Feature – COPY_ONLY option I decided that excluding the ReportServerTempdb from the backups was unnecessary.
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EDIT: new version of stored procedure is located here. Use the new version for 2005/2008. Use the below version for 2000.
I have modified isp_Backup, which is the stored procedure that I use to backup SQL Server databases.
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Microsoft published the ERD for the system views about a month ago, but I'm just now seeing it. It is available in PDF or XPS format.
You can download them here.
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As a DBA, we are often asked to refresh a database, which means to overwrite an existing database using a different database's backup. If you are rarely asked to do this, you may decide to do it manually.
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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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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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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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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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