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Category: Administration

Narrowing Down Deprecated Feature Usage

Published 2017-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason now skips msdb when he looks for deprecated feature usage:

In my previous post, I took a stab at monitoring deprecation events for SQL Server. It didn’t go so well. A deprecation event occurred more than 5,000 times in a very short period of time, and I got one email for every occurrence. Not good. Here’s what I kept seeing over and over:

USER_ID will be removed from a future version of SQL Server. Avoid using this feature in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use the feature. Use DATABASE_PRINCIPAL_ID instead.

It turns out the system stored proc msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail has a USER_ID() reference. I suspect an unrelated alert/email happened once, which executed sp_send_dbmail, which generated a DEPRECATION_FINAL_SUPPORT event, which ultimately led to another execution of sp_send_dbmail, which generated yet another DEPRECATION_FINAL_SUPPORT event, and round and round we go.

Click through for examples of deprecated features that various Microsoft products, including Reporting Services and Team Foundation Server, still use.

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Identifying Deprecated Features

Published 2017-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason provides a method for determining if you’re using deprecated functionality on your SQL Server instance:

I’ve wanted to do some Event Notification testing for SQL Server deprecation events for quite some time. The thought process here is that I could send myself an alert to identify usage of SQL Server features that will be removed from the next major version (or future version) of SQL Server. I could then forward this info to development and let them take action…or not (I kid, I kid). Today is the day I finally got around to the testing. I didn’t get very far, though.

Without rehashing the basics of event notifications (this post may help if you need some context), I created an EVENT NOTIFICATION for the TRC_DEPRECATION event group. That group includes the DEPRECATION_FINAL_SUPPORT and DEPRECATION_ANNOUNCEMENT child events. I also created a QUEUE, a SERVICE, and an activation PROCEDURE (for the QUEUE). The proc is simplistic. It takes the EVENTDATA() XML data, transforms it into an HTML <table>, and emails the info to me.

Watch out, though:  Dave discovered something quite funny when he set this up.

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VMware Configuration For SQL Server

Published 2017-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Mlakar talks about things you want to look at if you’re running SQL Server on VMware:

In a virtual data center CPU is spread across many guest VMs. This is one of the key drivers behind the effort to virtualize – CPU cores mostly sit unused. For example, we can take a host with maybe 48 cores and virtualize many machines that present logically with > 48 cores. The hypervisor can swap in and our cores as it needs based on what the guest VMs are doing. If the baseline for a guest VM is only 10% CPU usage then this is easy. However, when an intense application like SQL Server is virtualized it must have CPU available otherwise performance will suffer noticeably.

Generally for CPU on a guest VM:

  • Reservations on CPU are not often possible but consider them if you data center allows for it.

  • You want more cores than sockets. So if you are aiming for 8 cores you want something like 2 sockets with 4 cores each instead of 8 sockets with 1 core each.

  • If priority can be given to the SQL VM for CPU then change the Shares Resource Allocation from normal to high.

Click through for more helpful hints.

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Disk Usage By Table Report

Published 2017-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher shows off my favorite built-in SSMS report:

Every now and again you need to know how big a table is. Or several tables. Or all of the tables. Number of rows is frequently handy when you’re going to create a new index or otherwise modify the table. The amount of space used by the indexes can be helpful in deciding how much space you need to do a re-index. The tables with the most unused space is nice to know if you have a problem with ever growing heaps.

In the past my go to solution here was sp_spaceused. It’s a really handy procedure.

USE AdventureWorks2014;
GO
EXEC sp_spaceused 'Person.Person';
GO

Great information but it has a few problems. You can only run it for one table at a time (sp_msforeachtable is a workaround, if undocumented), the file sizes aren’t consistent (sometimes KB, sometimes MB or even GB), and it only returns the name of the object but not the schema. So if there is the same table name under multiple schemas it can get tricky.

Read on for how to access and use this report.

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2016 Best Practices By Default

Published 2017-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield shows how SQL Server 2016 helps you follow best practices:

tempdb

Ahh, tempdb. In SQL Server, that database does so much… it’s where temporary tables and table variables are stored. It’s where row version activity is stored. It’s where running queries will spill out temporary workspace needed for the query. And on, and on, and on. On busy systems, having this database running optimally is of vital importance. And there are several best practices that need to be observed here.

Read on for several tips.

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Collecting Processes During High-CPU Events

Published 2017-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Laerte Junior has a job which captures processes when server CPU is high:

Whatever the query you prefer to use, the big question will be how to do it in real time when the problem is actually happening, and log whatever information you need, even on the unattended server. There are plenty of times you need to do this, especially if you don’t have a full-time DBA or if you are running in the cloud and needs some support from the cloud provider. You can help the support Engineer by sending him the queries that are breaking your system. In AWS, this kind of service is out of scope of support, but if you have luck to find an Engineer that knows SQL Server and is willing to help you, as I was, it will, help him or her to help you to tune the queries. You just need to leave the solution and then get the CSV log with the queries.

If you can’t get a monitoring solution in place and have to roll your own, this is a very good piece of the puzzle.

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Basics Of Database Properties

Published 2017-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey explains some of the more important database properties:

Recovery Model

The Recovery Model option is something that you will manipulate constantly as you create databases. A full overview of what the different recovery models are and why you would choose each one will be covered in detail in a blog post later when we talk about database backups. Just to introduce the concept, if you set Recovery to Full, you will need to set up backups for your log. If you set Recovery to Simple then the logs will clean up on their own. There’s a lot more to the topic than just that, but that’s the simple part.

Read on for more.

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Copying Databases With dbatools

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins has a video showing how to copy databases from several SQL Server instances using dbatools:

The video starts out by checking the default instance of SQL Server on a server named SQL17 to see if any user databases exist. Then the names of five different SQL Servers are piped to ForEach-Object. Within the ForEach-Object loop, $_ is a variable for the current object. It’s translated to each individual server name as it iterates through the list of SQL Servers, copying the user databases to SQL17. Only one user database exists on each of the source SQL Servers. The databases are backed up to the specified network share and restored to the destination server. The network share and any sub-folders that are specified must already exist. The account that SQL Server runs as on each of the servers must also have access to the network share. The names of the SQL Servers used in the demo correspond to the version of SQL Server they’re running. The SQL05 server is running Windows Server 2008 (non-R2) and does not have any version of PowerShell installed which means the Copy-SqlDatabase function is extremely versatile.

Click through to watch the video and see how quickly you can get going.

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Certificate Copying

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Brian Carrig shows how to create certificates from binary:

Sometimes it is necessary to copy a certificate from one database to another database. The most common method I have seen to do this is involves taking a backup of the certificate to disk from one database and then restoring the certificate to the other database.

There is however, a lesser known alternative option available, provided you are working with SQL Server 2012 and above. Sadly despite it being 2017, this is not as foregone a conclusion for SQL Server DBAs as it should be. This alternate option is known as CREATE CERTIFICATE FROM BINARY. There are a few caveats with this option. Chief among them is that you cannot use a variable for the binary value, so you will likely end up needing to use some dynamic SQL.

One of the nice aspects to this feature from an administration and a security perspective is that you do not need to worry about accidentally leaving a copy of your certificate on a disk somewhere or having to remember to delete it after you have imported it into your user database.

Read on to see it in action.  Also, it’s about time that Brian started blogging.

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Grooming The Error Log

Published 2017-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson explains how to keep your SQL Server error logs in check:

We typically think of error logs as somewhere to go to find issues, but what if your error logs ARE the issue? Like most anything else in SQL Server, if you neglect your error logs you can run into trouble. Even on a low-traffic SQL Server instance, a bad piece of code, or a hardware issue, could easily fill your error logs, and with the introduction of Hekaton in SQL Server 2014, the SQL Server error log started getting a lot more data pumped into it than you might have been used to before. What this means for the DBA is that you can quickly start filling your main system drive (if your SQL install and error logs are in the default location) with massive error logs. So what questions should you be answering about error logs to make sure you don’t run into problems?

Read on to learn more.

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