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Month: January 2016

Don’t Rebuild Heaps

Published 2016-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones notes the issues around rebuilding tables lacking clustered indexes:

What about adding a clustered index and dropping it? Nooooooo, and again, I learned something new. This causes two rebuilds of the non-clustered indexes as they are rebuilt with the cluster addition and then rebuilt when the table changes back to a heap (to get the heap locations). That’s crazy, and certainly not what we want.

Also read Matthew Darwin’s comment, as “Don’t do X” usually has an “Except when Y” corollary.

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Building A Baseline

Published 2016-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato has put together a set of scripts to collect baseline stats for an instance:

The topic of baselines in SQL Server is one that I’ve had an interest in for a long time.  In fact, the very first session I ever gave back in 2011 was on baselines.  I still believe they are incredibly important, and most of the data I capture is still the same, but I have tweaked a couple things over the years.  I’m in the process of creating a set of baseline scripts that folks can use to automate the capture of this information, in the event that they do not have/cannot afford a third-party monitoring tool (note, a monitoring tool such as SQL Sentry’s Performance Advisor can make life WAY easier, but I know that not every can justify the need to management).  For now, I’m starting with links to all relevant posts and then I’ll update this post once I have everything finalized.

If you don’t know what “normal” looks like, you’ll have a hard time discerning whether something is wrong.  The better you understand a normal workload, the easier it is to spot issues before end users call you up.

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Talking People Out Of SA

Published 2016-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar walks through one way to reduce SA account usage.

Part one:  the nice way.

In a perfect world, you’d create a minimally-privileged AD login that only has limited access to specific databases.

However, when you’ve got a toddler running with scissors and razors, sometimes you’re happy just to get the razors out of their hands first, and then you’ll work on the scissors next. One step at a time. Preferably not running.

For now, create another SQL account with DBO permissions on all of the databases involved with the application. (If you’re dealing with multiple different tenants on the same server, give them each their own SQL login.) Let them be complete owners of their databases for now.

Part two:  the not-as-nice way.

Power User: “EVERYTHING IS DOWN! THE SA ACCOUNT PASSWORD ISN’T WORKING! DID YOU RESET IT?”

Me: “Of course not. You told me not to.”

Power User: “THEN WHO DID IT?”

Me: “Oh, I have no way of knowing. Anyone who uses the account can change the password with theALTER LOGIN command. And you said everyone has it, right?”

That’s a nice account you have; it’d be a shame if something…unfortunate…were to happen to it.

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Automated Database Shrinking

Published 2016-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Shaw talks about auto-shrink:

If you are new to being a Database Administrator or the Primary focus of your job is not to be a DBA you may see the benefits of shrinking a database automatically.  If the database shrinks by itself, it might be considered self-management; however, there is a problem when doing this.

When you shrink a data file SQL Server goes in and recovers all the unused pages, during the process it is giving that space back to the OS so the space can be used somewhere else.  The downstream effect of this is going to be the fact your indexes are going to become fragmented.  This can be demonstrated in a simple test.

Friends don’t let friends auto-shrink.

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Pausing The SQL Server Service

Published 2016-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Tom LaRock shows us that we can pause the SQL Server service, as well as what that gets us:

By pausing the SQL Server service before restarting the instance we allow end users to continue their work uninterrupted and we also stop any new connections to the instance. This is a nicer way of telling people to “get out” of the database in order for the server to be rebooted. I wouldn’t leave the server paused for 60 minutes of course, but I would rather use this method than forcibly disconnect users and rollback their transactions.

This is a nice way of bleeding the service dry before taking an instance down for maintenance.

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Fixing SQL Server R Services Installation Issues

Published 2016-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Cody Konior notes that upgrading from CTP 3.0 to CTP 3.2 can cause SQL Server R Services to break:

If you were using CTP 3.0 and later ran an in-place upgrade to CTP 3.2 this will silently break R Services. Uninstalling and reinstalling the R component will not fix the problem, but it can be fixed. There are a few interrelated issues here so bear with me.

Hopefully you don’t run into this issue, but if you do, at least there’s a fix.

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How Do Natively Compiled UDFs Perform?

Published 2016-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Gail Shaw investigates natively compiled user-defined functions in SQL Server 2016:

When I saw that, the first question that came to mind is whether natively compiling a scalar function reduces the overhead when calling that function within another query. I’m not talking about data-accessing scalar UDFs, since natively compiled functions can only access in-memory tables, but functions that do simple manipulation of the parameters passed in. String formatting, for example, or date manipulation.

While not as harmful as data-accessing scalar UDFs, there’s still overhead as these are not inline functions, they’re called for each row in the resultset (as a look at the Stored Procedure Completed XE event would show), and the call to the function takes time. Admittedly not a lot of time, but when it’s on each row of a large resultset the total can be noticeable.

Read the whole thing and check out Gail’s method and conclusions.

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Who Grew The Database?

Published 2016-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Galbraith helps us figure out who to blame for database growth:

I feel a little dirty writing about the Default Trace in the world of Extended Events, but I also know that many people simply don’t know how to use XEvents, and this can be faster if you already have it in your toolbox.  Also it will work back to SQL 2005 where XEvents were new in SQL 2008.

I have modified this several times to improve it – I started with a query from Tibor Karaszi (blog/@TiborKaraszi), modified it with some code from Jason Strate (blog/@StrateSQL), and then modified that myself for what is included and what is filtered.  There are links to both Tibor’s and Jason’s source material in the code below.

I usually just blame the BI team for database growth.

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Planning SQL Server Migrations

Published 2016-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little has some great resources to get you started with a SQL Server migration:

Planning to move to new hardware for your SQL Server? Techniques like log shipping and database mirroring can be incredibly useful to make the change fast and painless– but you’ve got to pick the right techniques for your environment ahead of time, and know how to do a few things that aren’t in the GUI.

Some of this stuff could also feed into a disaster recovery plan.

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