Grumpy Old DBA - Beware the darkside !

We all read the instructions first - right ?

2012-02-09T20:08:00Z

I've been working with the bare metal Hyper V and it's been an interesting time, if you haven't ever encountered windows core then it's a bit of a culture shock, as I understand it SQL Server will be running on windows core very soon - or maybe I read it wrong? Anyway having built my Hyper V server I decided that I'd build a cluster on it, for this you need some shared storage and one way to achieve this is to use Windows Storage Server which in effect creates an iscsi san. So...(read more)

x64 Memory Issues - revisited

2012-01-26T08:19:00Z

It's funny how things seem to bob to the surface every so often, a bit like revivals of Musicals or the fact you know it's christmas becuase ET is on the TV again. Blake Morrision from the Ask the Performance Team has blogged about issues with working sets and SQL Server, http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2012/01/25/real-life-sql-working-set-trimming-issue.aspx ( If you don't subscribe to this blog then you're missing a useful source of help ) I blogged about this back in...(read more)

Q. When is a HEAP not a HEAP ?

2011-12-15T20:56:00Z

A. When it’s on SQL Server. A very important part of Business Analysis is understanding the perceptions of users even if they haven’t clearly stated a requirement, so a SQL Server table without a clustered index is known as a heap ( in fairness I could say that a table with a clustered index is an ordered heap ), programmers understand heaps as a last in first out “store” ( LIFO ) so if I posed this question " If I put 200 rows of data into a SQL Server table which has no indexes and then select...(read more)

A follow up to yesterday

2011-11-22T22:02:00Z

As I have been asked, here to tidy up yesterdays post is the procedure my startup procedure calls along with the logging table deployed in the DBA database. Just to muddy the water further I have routines for remotely calling the DBAMessages table through a remote server to send out email from a central server!! Just to explain that I have been ( previously ) limited to only using one Server to send email alerts for multiple Servers so I attempt to code to deal with all possible circumstances...(read more)

Hello it’s your server calling

2011-11-21T20:12:00Z

This is nothing exciting but I've always found this startup procedure very useful. All this simple procedure does is send you an email if the SQL Service Starts. If your Server is a cluster it will tell you which node you're on. -- On it's own this procedure can't actually be used as I route the output through another procedure, dbasp_SendMessage, this procedure routes a passed message to either a smtp email or a log table or both, the destination is set in a server config table...(read more)

Table Variables and Parallel Plans

2011-09-12T19:52:00Z

I’m sure somewhere there must be carved into the side of a mountain those immortal words “ Well it seemed a good idea at the time!” ( with due homage to HHGTTG ) Hopefully there’s nothing in this post which you the reader will not know about already? However, I thought it would be interesting to recount the steps and findings from tuning a small stored procedure in one of our production systems as it illustrates how simple changes can improve performance and how two aspects of tuning can interact...(read more)

Posts of Interest

2011-09-05T12:23:00Z

I don't make a habit of just posting links as I think it's like a form of cheating, however sometimes there are things I want to keep track of and I know If I put the link on my blog I'll find it again! so: a short one here; We've just bought some new servers with 10 core processors, or 20 if you turn on hyperthreading. That's 80 cores/threads which is sort of a waste if you're not going to make use of parallel plans, however it does make a backup fast! I saw this post form...(read more)

Things you overhear !!

2011-09-01T15:31:00Z

"You can't get better than 90% can you?" " we need to disaggregate down the data"...(read more)

A New Record ( How many noughts ????????? )

2011-07-16T22:31:00Z

I have to say I thought I’d seen it all but this last week brought an event of such magnitude I may be contacting the Guinness Book of Records. OK that’s not true, but I’d like to! One of our production systems has to support a certain element of real time reporting, now OLTP applications don’t really go hand in hand with Reporting but to be honest not all applications clearly fall into one camp or another; for instance how do you place a financial system – well it certainly supports transactions...(read more)

Sometimes I really wonder !!!

2011-07-14T20:56:00Z

With all the best intentions in the world I did a review of some of our non production environments, what I realised was that we had not changed the default password on these environments for a number of years; essentially all user passwords are set to a default when cleansing the production environments. OK so far so good – I let everyone know and refreshed the environments. Now let’s say that the original passwords were not exactly very secure – you’d maybe find them in a hackers dictionary. What...(read more)