A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Michael Bourgon has a pivot script:
Say you have records from your monitor that happens to Track EventLogs.
We’ll call it EventLog_Tracking for argument’s sake (hint hint http://thebakingdba.blogspot.com/2015/05/powershell-eventlogtracking-capturing.html) and want to look at trends over time.
Dynamic pivoting is possible (I have an example en passant in a tally table presentation I created a couple years back), but it’s not the easiest thing in the world.
Comments closedAllan Hirt with a public service announcement:
Microsoft recently published an official .NET team blog post reiterating that .NET Framework versions 4, 4.5, and 4.5.1 will no longer receive security updates, support, or hotfixes as of January 12, 2016. This was first announced back in August of 2014, so it’s not like this is new news, but I can say from experience virtually no one is talking about it. MS’ new post talks more about the upgrade path. To sum it up, you need to install .NET Framework 4.5.2, 4.6, or 4.6.1 to be considered supported when it comes to your .NET Framework version. Security is a real issue for many, and those responsible may not know that your version of .NET Framework could be a possible attack vector. Is your security team aware of this impending problem? How will this affect your version matrices (you do have those, right?)?
This is a cross-cutting concern, and I know a majority of database administrators aren’t directly responsible for .Net Framework patches, but work with whoever is responsible and keep them up to date.
Comments closedMonica Rathbun needed to rename a table in a lot of scripts. Here’s how she did it:
The quick answer that I came up with is to script out all of the stored procedures into a single query window. This can be done easily through the GUI. Once that is complete, I can easily do a “Find & Replace” on the table name and we’re done!
Ideally, those stored procedures are in source control already and you do your find-and-replace there, but sometimes you can’t control that.
Comments closedRobert Davis shares a story of statistics corruption causing certain queries to fail:
I suspected that there was some difference between the queries that failed and the ones that were successful in SSMS. It ran the query they gave me, and I got the same error. I got disconnected and no further error info was returned. I also verified that the same query was successful on the otehr two tables mentioned. No errors on the other tables.
I wanted to know what error was causing the connection to be terminated, so I checked the SQL log and discovered that every time it failed, it was generating a stack dump. Before I was done investigating, it had generated 21 stack dumps. The key user-usable error info in the log was:
* Exception Address = 00007FF93BCF7E08 Module(sqlmin+00000000001E7E08)
* Exception Code = c0000005 EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
* Access Violation occurred reading address 0000000000000000
It turns out that CHECKDB & CHECKTABLE do not look at statistics. If you find yourself in this situation, it’s not a bad idea to see if this is the cause.
Comments closedJoey D’Antoni shows us how to measure IOPs (I/O Per Second) on a SQL Server instance/server:
That handy SQL Server:Resource Pool Stats counter and it’s Disk Read IO/sec and Disk Write IO/sec provide you with the data you need to give your SAN admin. In this screenshot this is an Enterprise Edition instance, and you can see my resource pools on the left side—so if you are using resource governor, you could use this to classify IO workload by application for potential chargeback situations.
Very useful, and when combined with Resource Governor, can help you throttle I/O effectively (as opposed to wildly flailing in the general direction of a fix).
Comments closedTamera Clark analyzes SQL Saturday Nashville data:
Select the funnel from the visualizations (1), select track in the field list (2) and drag track to the values box (3). (Image 5 below) Now we need to customize this visualization. Select the paint brush to edit. (Image 6 below) I recommend giving each of the tracks a different color. Since Tracks are determined by the organizer the data maybe similar so you might want to use the same colors for more than one data point. You should also update the title Count of Tracks by Track sounds silly. Now we have a lovely display of session distribution by track.
She came up with a nice-looking set of information describing sessions and presenters for SQL Saturday Nashville 2016. I love seeing this kind of thing and hope it becomes mainstream among SQL Saturday organizers (maybe to the point where some of this is built into the SQL Saturday website).
Comments closed