Category: Administration

Jana Sattainathan has a few considerations before running a detach-attach operation:

On the detached database files, the file permissions change when detaching. i.e., The AD account (your AD account) performing the detach operation becomes the owner and the only person with permissions to the file. It does not inherit the permissions from the folder. Oddly, if you just detach and reattach, it would attach fine even though SQL Server Service account does not have any explicit permissions on the files. However, others cannot attach a file that you detached even if they are on the Administrators group until they are explicitly granted permissions on the files themselves. This is well explained in this MSSQLTips article. Quoting the article, if you want to retain file permissions on detach, set the trace flag 1802.

“SQL Server 2005 introduced trace flag 1802 which retains the database files permission after the detach operation. The trace flag is tested and still applicable with SQL Server 2016.”

Click through for several tips of similar ilk.

Warren Estes explains how he keeps track of his servers using a Central Management Server:

We use a CMS server for each domain and I can’t imagine life without it. Kind of like when I discovered Amazon prime, or bought my first memory foam mattress.

The real magic of a CMS comes from being able to push jobs, or evaluate policies, on any server (targets) you want.

You can also execute T-SQL against all, or a subset of servers with either registered servers or CMS.

There are some caveats to look out for like collation differences and version specific DMVs when running queries across instances. Also security needs to be addressed. However, that is outside the scope of this post. You can find that information in the links in the first section.

I liked CMS when I had to deal with a dozen instances.  With hundreds of instances, I wouldn’t want to administer anything without one.

Brent Ozar has some interesting and mostly disheartening statistics:

One of my favorite things about my job is being able to take the pulse of how real companies are managing their databases. I don’t wanna be locked in an ivory tower, preaching down to you, dear reader, about how you should be doing five million things a day – when in reality, you’re struggling to get an hour of real work done because you’ve got so many meetings.

But sometimes I wonder – am I out of touch? When I was a DBA, I remember struggling with backups and corruption checking – has that gotten easier? Have today’s DBAs started using more automation and tools to protect their estate? Is Transparent Data Encryption catching on? Did DBAs start using Extended Events for monitoring when I wasn’t looking?

And it’s important because I wanna build the right training material and scripts for our customers. I see a problem trending, I want to be able to give people the right information to fix the problem, fast.

Standard disclaimers about potential bias in samples apply, but it’s an interesting slice of the population.

Tracy Boggiano has a lengthy script which dynamically builds out files and filegroups for you:

Here are the six different ways you can run this procedure to files and filegroups for your database:

1. Set up partitions with a set size for each file

2. Set up partitions based on the size of a table

3. By monthly date range with a set size for each file

4. By monthly date range with sized based on the size of a table

5. One file with a set size

6. One file based on the size of a table

She then has examples for each call, so check it out.

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman explains the DM_DB_LOG_STATS dynamic management function in SQL Server 2017:

This is an addition to SQL Server 2017 and available in Azure Database/Azure Data Warehouse to simplify and synchronize how we query information about log statistics, not just backups.  The added benefit of this is that it only requires the VIEW DATABASE STATE privilege to utilize it, which eases the demand on anyone who’s tried to grant rights to view backup information to non-DBA personnel in previous releases.  With this DMV, you can monitor, alert and kick off jobs to manage the transaction log backups.

It does require the database_id to be passed to it to provide results, but who keeps that around?  Much easier to just do a Cross Apply to sys.databases and make your life simple.

Click through to see what’s included on this useful DMV.

Paul Randal explains what the recovery interval option on SQL Server really means:

One of the concepts I find people misunderstand frequently is the recovery interval, either for the server as a whole or the per-database setting that was introduced in SQL Server 2012 for indirect checkpoints.

There are two misconceptions here:

1. The recovery interval equals how often a checkpoint will occur

2. SQL Server guarantees the recovery interval (i.e. crash recovery for the database will only take the amount of time specified in the recovery interval)

It’s good to keep this in mind.

Arun Sirpal plays with MAXDOP settings on Azure SQL Database:

Can we change it? No.

EXEC sp_configure 'cost threshold for parallelism', 10;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO

Msg 2812, Level 16, State 62, Line 9 Could not find stored procedure ‘sp_configure’. Msg 40510, Level 16, State 1, Line 11 Statement ‘CONFIG’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

But read on for something you can do.