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Tag Archives: SSP
SQL University Troubleshooting Week: Having a Plan for Every Situation
Today’s SQL University post will highlight the need to have a methodology to address issues that we as IT professionals may encounter in the course of our day. We will start off by looking at why we need to have a plan for every situation, and then we will dig into a methodology that I have developed by stealing bits and pieces of other people’s approaches over my career. Continue reading
SQL University Troubleshooting Week: Keeping an Open Mind
Having a good attitude is key to success in the information technology field. Keeping an open mind is central to that. By going with the flow and looking at issues from the right perspective we can solve problems faster while becoming known for our skill and professionalism. Continue reading
SQL University Troubleshooting Week: Communication
It should come as no surprise that the first topic I am covering this week is communication because the first thing I think anyone should do is communicate that they are troubleshooting an issue. This post will cover why we should communicate then dig into how to put together an initial alert. The rest of the post will be spent talking about how to communicate updates and the resolution. Continue reading
SQL University Troubleshooting Week: Syllabus
I am honored to close out the final week of the Spring 2011 semester with a topic that I really enjoy: Troubleshooting. I really enjoy solving problems and that has caused me to get pulled into many situations where I could use and develop my troubleshooting skills. I hope to share the things I have learned here this week to speed everyone along in the process, hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls that I had along the way. Continue reading
SQL Saturday 67 Slides Are Now Available
I recently debuted a new presentation, “What To Do When It All Goes So Wrong”. The presentation is designed to give Database Administrators a basic overview of the skills they need to handle virtually any crisis that may arise. While the target audience is DBAs, I feel that most IT Professionals can benefit from the concepts. Continue reading
Looking Up Email Addresses with PowerShell
A week or so ago Aaron Nelson put out a call for help on Twitter looking for anyone that could help with adding autocomplete for looking up an email address to a PowerShell forms application. The original request was to look up the user in the Global Address List (GAL) via Outlook but after some thought we decided to switch to looking up the recipients Active Directory (AD), allowing the search to work on machines that do not have Outlook installed…like servers. I will walk through both functions then provide a quick and dirty test application so you can try out the code for yourself.
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Would You Like To Play A Game?
Do you have a favorite line from a holiday movie? Can you change it around slightly to make it SQL related? If so then this is the game for you. Starting this morning and going until we get bored or run out of ideas we will be playing #tsqlHolidayMovieLines on Twitter.
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Certificate Based Application Roles
What if I told you that you could sign an assembly that your Windows application uses with a certificate, load that certificate into SQL Server and then define rights on that user-assembly combination. The perfect world where a user would have different rights based on the application they are running but still act under their Windows identity. The perfect world where things work just the way they should. Continue reading
Using DMVs to Find the Ports that SQL Server is Listening On
The other day I was asked to provide the port number that a SQL Server instance was listening on. As luck would have it, the log file from the last time SQL Server started had rolled off so I was left with either using remote desktop to log onto the server and all the risk that includes or finally figuring out how to query it from the DMVs. I opted for the second option. Continue reading
How Do I Change SSRS Report Credentials with Powershell?
Ever had to change the login information for all reports in a particular folder? In my case I was going from SQL authentication to Windows authentication for 4 folders with 15-20 reports each. I had done this before, manually, but I broke a few reports and it took hours to complete. Having to do the whole thing a second time meant a script was in order. Continue reading
Careful with the New MCM Requirements
Be careful with the new MCM requirements. You only need the SQL 2008 certifications now. If you have already started down the 2005 path then at least you know you are not alone. I should add that I have been in contact with the right people (not naming here since they may or may not be part of the first line support) to get the incorrect page updated. It may take a couple of weeks to get the incorrect page updated with the coming holiday but I am confident they will get it taken care of. Continue reading
Want to Make Your SQL Server Run Faster for Free?
Want to Make Your SQL Server Run Faster for Free? The trick is to properly manage your VLFs. What are VLFs? The short anser is that VLF stands for virtual log file. SQL Server database log files are made up of many smaller virtual log files that make it easier for SQL Server to manage the log files. Continue reading
Get Drive Space Including Mount Points
Today’s post is a quick one that came out of a conversation on Twitter. To make a long story short, somebody was having trouble with mount points filling up because they were not being caught by the current monitoring script. I offered to look up how my monitoring was figuring out this data and post it here. Continue reading
Troubleshooting SQL Server Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 16
I recently struggled with tracking down a rogue process that was failing to log in on one of my servers. It took a bit of fiddling but I eventually found that you can trace login failed due to missing database errors with Profiler. The trick is to look for the User Error Message filtered for TextData Like ‘Cannot open database%’. Continue reading
A Brute Force Way to Compress a Database
There are a handful of scripts out there to compress all of of the objects in your SQL 2008 database using Row, Page or a smart combination of both compression types. This is not one of those scripts.
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When is that Restore Going to Finish?
This post describes a query to get the estimated completion time of a process on SQL Server. Continue reading
Posted in General
Tagged dm_exec_requests, estimated_completion_time, percent_complete, SQL 2005, SQL 2008, SQL 2008 R2, SSC, SSP
5 Comments
Stop Forgetting the DAC
We no longer have to blindly restart SQL, hoping that we are not setting up a situation where our most important database will be in recovery for minutes or hours. We now have the tools to accurately diagnose a problem the first time it happens. We just have to remember to use them. Continue reading
How Do I Spot Identity Columns That Are About to Max Out?
Every so often, usually in the middle of the night or on a holiday weekend, an identity column will hit the maximum size for it’s data type and stop allowing new values to be inserted into the table. I needed a way to identify the identity columns that are in danger of maxing out before they did, so I wrote one. Continue reading
Can Deadlocks be Resolved by Adding an Index?
Can Deadlocks be Resolved by Adding an Index? Yes. Really, I’m not kidding. Here, I’ll show you how. Continue reading
Posted in Troubleshooting
Tagged DBCC PAGE, Deadlock, DELETE, R2, SQL 2005, SQL 2008, SSC, SSP
4 Comments
How is Fill Factor Impacting My Indexes?
The theme for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is indexes so it seemed like the perfect excuse to blog about a script that I have written to see what choices for fill factors on indexes actually does to the structure of those indexes. Continue reading
Posted in Utilities
Tagged fill factor, fill_factor, SQL 2005, SQL 2008, SQL 2008 R2, SSC, SSP, sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats
13 Comments
How Can I Quickly Script Out Replication?
This script takes a distribution server name and an output directory as parameters then works through all publications on each of the servers that connects to the distribution server, scripting them out. Continue reading