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Category: Administration

Invoke-DbaDiagnosticQuery In dbatools

Published 2019-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Andre Kamman walks through a particularly useful cmdlet in the dbatools package:

My answer to that is simple, I’m a major contributor to the awesome Powershell library dbatools. What I’ve contributed to that library are commands that will help automate the running and processing of queries from the DMV library of Glenn Berry
At some point in the life of a DBA we’ve all come accross his scripts. For the longest time I would advise people to google “Glenn Berry DMV”, and it will be the top result. 
The scripts however, come in a single file per SQL Server version and you can’t run them all in one go. You would have to select a script, run it, and paste the result from Management Studio into an Excel sheet. Glenn provides an empty sheet with tabs ready to paste the various result sets in. I’ve automated this part, hope you like it!

Click through for a demonstration of this cmdlet and the useful output it generates.

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Installing ML Services With Python Support In SQL Server 2019

Published 2019-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Rich Brenner walks us through installing SQL Server 2019 and enabling Python support:

First things first, you’ll want to choose your version of SQL Server. Python is available on 2017 and greater. For this demo I’ll be using SQL Server 2019 Developer Edition (CTP 2.2).
With 2019 CTP2.2 they’ve increased the requirement of your OS too, in my example I had a spare VM with Windows Server 2012 laying around but I needed to update this to Server 2016. Check the relevant documentation for the version you’re using.

Click through for a step by step guide with plenty of screenshots.

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Emailing SSIS Errors

Published 2019-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Schott improves upon Kevin Hill’s script:


Recently, Kevin Hill (b | t ) posted on getting package errors from the SSIS catalog in a single query as opposed to clicking through the SSIS Reports and digging through pages.  I took that and ran with it a little bit. The first pass needed an additional index on the catalog to increase performance.  Kevin’s included that at the bottom of his query on the post above.  (You probably don’t need the included “message” column, though.)
I wanted to take this and run with it a little bit to report on all errors for a given folder within the last day, then e-mail that in an HTML formatted e-mail. To that end, I wrote up a quick stored procedure that should take the Folder or Package or Project name and a “to” e-mail address to send an e-mail through DBMail.

Click through for the script.

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ARITHABORT And SET Options

Published 2019-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall explains an error message he received:

INSERT failed because the following SET options have incorrect settings: ‘ARITHABORT’. 
Verify that SET options are correct for use with 
indexed views 
and/or indexes on computed columns 
and/or filtered indexes 
and/or query notifications 
and/or XML data type methods 
and/or spatial index operations.
[SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 1934). The step failed.


Immediately I started looking at my creation scripts for the tables.  Nope, no XML indexes, no spatial indexes, no filtered indexes, no indexes on computed columns (not even any computed columns),  and no query notifications.

In Jason’s case, it was an oddity around SQL Agent jobs, but there are a few reasons this could pop up, and Jason explains some of the most common.

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Unattended SQL Server Installations

Published 2019-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Michal Sadowski walks us through unattended installations:

Imagine a situation when you are tasked to install a dozen SQL Server instances. Using an approach described in previous blog post  installation can take a significant amount of resources and time, also there is a probability of errors due to typos (e.g. in directory paths, etc.)
There are two options that can be used for the installation:
1. Using ConfigurationFile.ini
2. Using command line parameters to setup.exe file
Below there are step-by-step instructions on how to install SQL Server using both options.

If you only have a couple of SQL Server instances in your environment, unattended installation may seem a bit overwhelming. But as you have to deal with larger and larger numbers of instances, it’s the only way to keep your sanity. It’s also the only way to install on Windows Server Core.

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Counting Virtual Log Files

Published 2019-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick has a couple of scripts to help us monitor virtual log file counts for our transaction logs:

The LOGINFO command returns a row for each Virtual Log File in the Transaction Log. The FileSize column shows the size (KB) of each individual VLF. The amount of the transaction log that is currently in use can be determined by the number rows with a Status of 2 (0 = Inactive, 2 = Active & 4 = VLF exists on the Primary replica, but not on the Secondary replica).
One of the biggest problems with the LOGINFO command has been the difficulty of extrapolating the information to include all databases on the server, for use in reports, automated alerts and maintenance processes. Beginning with SQL Server 2016 SP2, there are 2 new Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) that can be used for monitoring the VLF information: sys.dm_db_log_info & sys.dm_db_log_stats.

A huge number of VLFs can be a hidden performance sink.

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The State Of Database Scoped Configurations

Published 2019-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer takes us through the current state of Database Scoped Configurations in SQL Server:

I have already blogged about the first version of the Database Scoped Configurations for SQL Server 2016, with 4 visible optionsplus the procedure cache cleaning option, but we have followed in SQL Server 2017 with 5 (listed) & 9 (in practice – DISABLE_INTERLEAVED_EXECUTION_TVF, DISABLE_BATCH_MODE_ADAPTIVE_JOINS, BATCH_MODE_MEMORY_GRANT_FEEDBACK, BATCH_MODE_ADAPTIVE_JOINS are visible and functioning), and in just another year we have received a huge upgrade to the currently available 21 for SQL Server 2019.

It seems like this is a common route the SQL Server teams are going down, and it makes sense: your settings for Mega-DB probably shouldn’t be the same as for the tiny database in the corner. Oh, and that whole Azure SQL Database thing.

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SQL Server’s Built-In Monitoring

Published 2018-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall has a three-part series on the types of monitoring built into SQL Server. Part one is an overview and includes the Default Trace:

The default trace by itself is something that can be turned off via configuration option. There may be good reason to disable the default trace. Before disabling the default trace, please consider the following that can be captured via the default trace. I will use a query to demonstrate the events and categories that are configured for capture in the default trace.

Part two looks at the system_health Extended Event session:

Beyond being a component of the black box for SQL Server, what exactly is this event session? The system_health is much as the name implies – it is a “trace” that attempts to gather information about various events that may affect the overall health of the SQL Server instance.
The event session will trap various events related to deadlocks, waits, clr, memory, schedulers, and reported errors. To get a better grasp of this, let’s take a look at the event session makeup based on the available metadata in the dmvs and catalog views.

Part three is the sp_server_diagnostics stored procedure:

Beyond being a component of the black box for SQL Server, what exactly is this diagnostics process? The sp_server_diagnostics is much as the name implies—it is a “diagnostics” service that attempts to gather information about various events that may affect the overall health of the SQL Server instance.
The diagnostics process will trap various server related health (diagnostics) information related to the SQL Server instance in an effort to try and detect potential failures and errors. This diagnostics session/process traps information for five different categories by default. There is a sixth category of information for those special servers that happen to be running an Availability Group.

I’ve used the first two but did not know about the third. Jason goes into good depth on each, showing you the types of information you can get out of these. Read the whole thing.

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Reasons Why We Get Identity Column Gaps

Published 2018-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones walks through several reasons why you might see gaps in identity columns:

Deleting Rows
This is noted in the tweet as a cause, but let’s test this.
One of the common ways that we get gaps in identity values is when rows are deleted. Let’s remove the row with Steve in it.

Steve explains a few others, but even that’s not complete: identity columns can jump after the service restarts as well.

In short, please do not use identity values in cases where you need to guarantee sequentiality (like check numbers or invoice numbers). Don’t use sequences either, as they’ll behave similarly.

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Troubleshooting Network Issues From The Command Line

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Mlakar walks us through a few tools for troubleshooting network connectivity solely from the command line:

NSLOOKUP
The nslookup command can check the name which an IP address will resolve to or which IP address resolves to a name (aka reverse lookup). This can be done either way as shown:

After having spent the long weekend futzing with Server Core instances for an upcoming project, I can also recommend learning the Powershell tools as well.

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