A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Erik Darling breaks Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:
In this post, we’ll talk about how to figure out if your SQL Server needs more memory, and if there’s anything you can do to make better use of memory at the same time.
After all, you could be doing just fine.
(You’re probably not.)
I have a simple flow chart: do you have all of the memory created since the 1990s? If not, then you need more memory. If so, may I please borrow a cup of RAM?
Comments closedSean Gallardy files events to the circular file:
Getting back on track instead of listening to me complain, many DBA’s and internal security folks like writing to the Windows Security Event Log because the word security is in the name and they have some tool like Splunk that automatically collects these details. I like automation, so that’s a nice win. However, you may be running into SQL Server error 33204 which is a failure to write an audit event to the security event log.
Read on to find one reason why this might happen.
Comments closedWe are currently performing migrations with upgrade of multiple-instance SQL Servers to new servers. The migrations are going smoothly (knock on wood), and I wanted to relay some information about the migration process. There are four phases you need to perform when migrating a SQL instance to a new server. These phases are Review, Prepare, Test, and Migrate. It sounds simple enough but let’s take a deeper look into what goes into each phase.
Read on for Jon’s take on the migration process.
Comments closedChad Callihan is trying to clean up this town:
Do you know which account is the owner for your SQL Server Agent jobs? Some jobs might be owned by user accounts which can become a problem. What happens if that job owner isn’t around forever and goes away? Will that job just keep chugging along?
Without an existing owner, a SQL Server Agent job will not run. Once a user gets disabled or removed from Active Directory, a job is still going to try running under that user but will begin failing.
Click through to see what kind of errors you might find.
Comments closedEric Rouach replaces SQL Agent:
For future use in our PowerShell script and since we do not want our Server’s credentials to appear in clear text, our next step will the creation of a credential within the Automation account. This will hold the credentials (username and password) that we’d use for connecting to our SQL Server target.
Click through to learn more.
Comments closedDani Ljepava announces support for Managed Instance link is now in public preview:
As of today, we are pleased to announce that the link feature for Managed Instance is available in the open public preview, in all Azure regions worldwide. It can be used with existing, or new managed instances, and SQL Server 2019 Enterprise, or Developer edition, including SQL Server 2022 CTP (available through EAP). We have also released the tooling support for the link in the form of automated wizards available in SQL Server Management Studio, starting from SSMS v18.11.1.
With the link, replicated databases from SQL Server on Managed Instance are usable as R/O secondary replicas. While the link is in operation, transactions commited on SQL Server (primary) are instantaneously committed to Managed Instance (secondary). This provides an exact replica of your SQL Server database on Managed Instance, synced near real-time. The link was built to be resilient, in case of the network being down, SQL Server being rebooted, or maintained, or in case of some other issue, the link will automatically resume replicating where it has left off when the issue has been resolved.
Support for 2019 is a shrewd idea, given the SQL Server version adoption curve for companies. This isn’t going to replace having a proper availability group for high availability or even (most) disaster recovery options, though, because the link is currently one-way—though Dani does mention eventual support for bi-directional operation with SQL Server 2022.
Comments closedTom Collins makes a connection:
Most SQL Servers use a large portion of the authentication as Windows Authentication – utilising Kerberos and NTLM protocols via Active Directory. So when it comes to considering moving on-prem SQL Server resources to Cloud Providers – Active Directory is a foundational question. There are other methods than Microsoft Directory – which I’ll discuss in future posts.
Utilising AWS RDS SQL Server with Windows Authentication methods is only possible using the AWS Directory Service. i.e The AWS RDS SQL Server is created and added as a resource to the AWS Directory Service . If on-prem users require access to the AWS RDS SQL Server via Kerberos , a forest trust is required between the AWS Directory Service and the on-prem AD.
For this post – the focus is on an existing on-premises SQL Server inventory using Microsoft Active Directory Services.
Read on to see what you’d need to do to implement this.
Comments closedChad Callihan has a couple notes about dropping offline databases:
“Oops” is not a word you want to utter often as a database administrator. Sure, accidents happen (who hasn’t missed that WHERE clause when deleting data) but there are steps you can take to minimize problems that will ruin your day, week, etc. Let’s look at a few ways to delete databases that supposedly are no longer needed.
“I’m feeling lucky” isn’t something most DBAs choose.
Comments closedJeff Iannucci has a follow-up for us:
This is a follow up post to the previous one about tables with no records using data space, with the idea coming from twitter of all places. Sometimes on twitter the conversations kill, but after reading that post my friend Chris Wood suggested writing something to FIND those tables.
Which is a solid idea, so let’s get to it. No time to wait too long.
Click through for the process.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski destroys alien Kubernetes pods at work:
A while ago I blogged about an awesome Chaos Engineering tools built by Eugenio Marzo (t) call KubeInvaders.
Since then Eugenio has updated the repo to make it easier to deploy KubeInvaders using Helm! So here’s how to deploy KubeInvaders to Azure Kubernetes Service using Helm.
This is really fun to watch in action.
Comments closed