Category: Administration

Arun Sirpal compares the Target Server Memory and Total Memory Perfmon counters:

Target Server Memory (KB) is the amount of memory that SQL Server is willing (potential) to allocate to the buffer pool under its current load. Total Server Memory (KB) is what SQL currently has allocated.

Using SQL Server 2014 developer edition (64 bit) my machine has 12GB RAM and maximum server memory is currently set to 8GB and for the purpose of this post I have set  minimum server memory to 1GB (Lock Pages in Memory has not been set).

Read on for a nice description laden with Perfmon pictures.

Erik Darling warns against messing with the Max Worker Threads setting:

The thing is, all changing that setting does is help you not run out of worker threads. It doesn’t make queries run any better or faster. In fact, under load, performance will most likely be downgraded to Absolute Rubbish© either way.

What’s worse? Running out of worker threads and queries having to wait for them to free up, or having way more queries trying to run on the same CPUs? Six of one, half dozen of punching yourself squarely in the nose.

I think there are a couple good counter-cases brought up in the comments (around mirroring and Service Broker), but it is solid general advice.

Michael Swart has a small console app which searches for INSERT statements missing column specifications:

I’ve got a program here that finds procedures with missing column specifications.

• If for some reason, you don’t care about enforcing this rule for temp tables and table variables, then uncomment the line // visitor.TolerateTempTables = true;

• It uses ScriptDom which you can get from Microsoft as a nuget package.

• The performance is terrible in Visual Studio because ScriptDom uses Antlr which uses exceptions for flow control and this leads to lots of “first chance exceptions” which slows down debugging. Outside of Visual Studio, it’s just fine.

Click through for the code.

Drew Furgiuele explains dynamic DNS and shows how to use Powershell to keep your Google Dynamic DNS record up to date:

Google’s Dynamic DNS API is really little less than a HTTPS POST to a specific URL with some parameters packed into the post. What makes it work, though, is for each dynamic DNS host name you provide, you get an auto-generated user name and password that needs to be part of the POST. PowerShell is really naturally suited for this type of automation, thanks to Invoke-WebRequest (MSDN Link). It’s built for this, and even supports HTTPS. Heck, it even supports the implementation of username:password in the request via a PSCredential object.

All I really needed to do was to wrap the code in a function and add some parameters that can be passed in, invoke the web request, and parse the results.

Click through for more information, including a couple Powershell scripts.

Andrew Peterson has a script to get row counts for each table based on sys.dm_db_partition_stats:

When you need the row count from a table, the most common way is to use count(*). But what if you need the row count for all the tables in your database?  You could use the sp_MSforeachtable stored procedure:

EXEC sys.sp_MSforeachtable ‘select ”?”,count(*) from ?;’;

Nice, but the return format is a bit difficult to manage, since it effectively runs the query for as many times as you have tables in your database.

Click through for Andrew’s script.  One thing to keep in mind is that the number of rows might be off, especially for columnstore tables with ghost records.  It’s an estimate, but one which tends toward the correct answer.

Kevin Hill has a top ten functions list for database administrators:

3. DBCC Opentran – log file filling up?  Processes blocked and timing out? See if some doofus (hopefully not you) left a transaction open and went to lunch.  If you are lucky you can kill it.   Unlucky and you find an undistributed replicated transaction.

4. Getdate() – Not sure why, but this winds up in probably 80% of the scripts I write.  Not surprisingly, it often brings along it’s little brother, DateDiff.

I’d go with GETUTCDATE() or SYSUTCDATETIME() over GETDATE(); that way, everything gets stored as UTC and you spend less time worrying about time zone or Daylight Savings Time issues.