Now that there are no connections we can move the database. Depending on the situation it might be worth setting the database to read only or single user mode first. In my case, I had the application taken down so I felt confident no connections would be coming in.
With one line of code we can select the source and destination servers, the database name, specify that we want to use the backup and restore method, and then provide the path to a file share that both instance service accounts have access to:
The whole process is just five lines of code, so it could hardly be easier.
One limitation in the current public preview is that tempdb don’t preserves custom settings after fail-over happens. If you add new files to tempdb or change file size, these settings will not be preserved after fail-over, and original tempdb will be re-created on the new instance. This is a temporary limitation and it will be fixed during public preview.
However, since Managed Instance supports SQL Agent, and SQL Agent can be configured to execute some script when SQL Agent start, you can workaround this issue and create a SQL Agent job that will pre-configure your tempdb.
SQL Agent will start whenever Managed Instance fail-over and the job that contains script above can increase tempdb size before you start running your workload on the new instance.
Managed Instance is your dedicated resource that is placed in Azure Virtual network with assigned private IP address. Before you create Managed Instance, you need to create Azure Virtual network using Azure portal, PowerShell, or Azure CLI.
If you are using Azure portal, make sure that you use Resource Manager ake sure that Service Endpoints option is Disabled in Creating Virtual Network Blade (this is default option so don’t change it).
If you want to have only one subnet in your Virtual Network (Virtual Network blade will enable you to define first subnet called default), you need to know that Managed Instance subnet can have between 16 and 256 addresses. Therefore, use subnet masks /28 to /24 when defining your subnet IP ranges for default subnet. If you know how many instances you will have make sure that you have at least 2 addresses per instance + 5 system addresses in the default subnet.
Both posts are useful if you’re interested in getting started with a managed instance.
I’ve noticed on demo machines that sometimes Telegraf doesn’t start on the first try, and this seems to not happen on most of my production servers, but they have a lot more memory and CPU power. So I figured I would write a quick blog post and provide a way to set up a way to get the service to start when the machine is rebooted. This is a known issue that a user has offered a bounty to get it fixed so if you know some Go and have time, please check out the issue on Github.
The other day I got thinking about what would happen if all databases on a single instance grew out, every single one of them! but not just once, what if they all grew out three, four or fives times overnight – what would things look like?
Well I know the likelihood may be slim but wouldn’t it be nice just to see how many times things could grow before it all runs out of space.
I decided for a bit of fun I would write a query to see what the drive space would look like, this would simulate database growth and then show what drive space would be left after the total growths specified.
It’s a good idea to anticipate this kind of activity, though based on the companies I’ve worked for in the past, the answer would be “run out of disk really fast.”
The database will be unavailable during this operation so we need to notify our end users. Consider the ramifications if an application is using the database – we might want to stop application services or take some other custom action during the move.
Plan ahead before starting the job. Know what you are going to do before doing it. If you can test your method against a lab or development database that will help too.
Sound advice and technique. Click through to see those three methods.
This module was developed and designed to ensure you can see if you have the best settings/configurations set up on your SQL systems using powershell. There are three pre-requisites that are required to load the module. Those are Pester 4.3.1, PS Framework 0.9.10.23, and currently as of this post dbatools 0.9.207. However, the team of dbachecks, kindly built in a notification for you if those modules and versions should those not be installed or would have a need to update.
What I really love about this module, is how you can utilize SQL CMS, and view the results at an enterprise reporting level.
Straight away, dbachecks gives you the option to include or exclude checks that you feel aren’t for you. If you only want to run a subset of the checks, then you can specify that.
The real beauty that I think dbachecks provide is that you are getting a wealth of checks for things that you may never have thought of checking or known how to check while being able to add any personal tests as well.
dbachecks is a framework created by and for SQL Server pros who need to validate their environments. Basically, we all share similar checklists and mostly just the server names and RPO/RTO/etc change.
This module allows us to crowdsource our checklists using Pester tests. Such checks include:
Backups are being performed
Identity columns are not about to max out
Servers have access to backup paths
Database integrity checks are being performed and corruption does not exist
Disk space is not about to run out
All enabled jobs have succeeded
Network latency does not exceed a specified threshold
SQL Information Protection (SQL IP) introduces a set of advanced services and new SQL capabilities, forming a new information protection paradigm in SQL aimed at protecting the data, not just the database:
Discovery & recommendations – The classification engine scans your database and identifies columns containing potentially sensitive data. It then provides you an easy way to review and apply the appropriate classification recommendations via the Azure portal.
Labeling – Sensitivity classification labels can be persistently tagged on columns using new classification metadata attributes introduced into the SQL Engine. This metadata can then be utilized for advanced sensitivity-based auditing and protection scenarios.
Monitoring/Auditing – Sensitivity of the query result set is calculated in real time and used for auditing access to sensitive data (currently in Azure SQL DB only).
Visibility – The database classification state can be viewed in a detailed dashboard in the portal. Additionally, you can download a report (in Excel format) to be used for compliance & auditing purposes, as well as other needs.
Check it out, especially with GDPR breathing down our necks.
The table was around 500GB with over 900 million rows. Based on the average number of inserts a day on that table, I estimated that we had eight months before inserts on that table would grind to a halt. This was an order entry table, subject to round-the-clock inserts due to customer activity. Any downtime to make the conversion to BIGINT was going to have to be minimal.
This article describes how I planned and executed a change from an INT to a BIGINT data type, replicating the process I used in a step by step guide for the AdventureWorks database. The technique creates a new copy of the table, with a BIGINT datatype, on a separate SQL Server instance, then uses object level recovery to move it into the production database.
There’s a way to do this without any downtime, though the trigger logic gets a little more complex and it does take longer.
You know you can have multiple filegroups right? You might have a separate filegroup for the data (the clustered index & heaps) and another for the indexes (non-clustered indexes). Or maybe you want to separate your data tables from the system tables. There are any number of reasons why you might want to have multiple filegroups, however, there will always be a primary filegroup and it will always be the default if you don’t specify otherwise. Right? Wrong.
I’ve never seen a way to remove primary or to move the system objects in it. However, you can change the primary filegroup.
Having a separate filegroup for your tables and another for indexes (or splitting things up some other way) can help get a database back online faster, as you can restore the system tables first and then restore filegroups as needed.