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Category: Administration

Using Pester To Validate Script Installations

Published 2016-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell wants to use Pester to guarantee that he has Ola’s maintenance scripts installed on a server:

First I thought about what I would look for in SSMS when I had installed the maintenance solution and made a list of the things that I would check which looked something like this. This would be the checklist you would create (or have already created) for yourself or a junior following this install. This is how easy you can turn that checklist into a Pester Test and remove the human element and open your install for automated testing

  • SQL Server Agent is running – Otherwise the jobs won’t run🙂

  • We should have 4 backup jobs with a name of

  • DatabaseBackup – SYSTEM_DATABASES – FULL

  • DatabaseBackup – USER_DATABASES – FULL

  • DatabaseBackup – USER_DATABASES – DIFF

  • DatabaseBackup – USER_DATABASES – LOG

  • We should have Integrity Check and Index Optimisation Jobs

  • We should have the clean up jobs

  • All jobs should be scheduled

  • All jobs should be enabled

  • The jobs should have succeeded

There’s a very nice script and walkthrough of the process if you click through.

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SSISDB Management

Published 2016-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leondard describes steps you can take to maintain the SSIS Catalog:

Back It Up

As with all SQL Server database, please back up SSISDB. What follows is a (very) basic guide describing one simple method to backup your SSISDB database. Please, please, please learn more about SQL Server backup and restore options and their implications before backing up an SSISDB database in your enterprise. Feel free to use the steps I describe on your laptop or a virtual machine. And please remember…

Backups are useless. Restores are priceless. Conduct practice Disaster Recovery exercises in which you restore databases and then test functionality. You’ll be glad you did. Here is a link containing Microsoft’s advice on restoring the SSISDB database in SQL Server 2016.

The advice is pretty similar to what you’d expect for any other database, but there are a couple twists around SSISDB functionality, so do read on.

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Automating Deadlock Execution Plan Collection

Published 2016-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart comes up with a system to collect execution plans at the time of a deadlock and log them to a table for further research:

So How Do I Get To The Execution Plans?
So when I look at a deadlock graph, I can see there are sql_handles. Given that, I can grab the plan_handle and then the query plan from the cache, but I’m going to need to collect it automatically at the time the deadlock is generated. So I’m going to need

  • XML shredding skills

  • Ability to navigate DMVs to get at the cached query plans

  • A way to programatically respond to deadlock graph events (like an XE handler or a trigger)

If you don’t have the funding to get a third-party tool in place which collects this information, this could be a good fit.

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TCP Chimney Offloading

Published 2016-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield offers advice on TCP Chimney Offloading:

With all of these changes to the OS, which setting should we use for SQL Server? In general, for all of these operating systems, I recommend that TCP Chimney Offload be disabled – because you can see odd connectivity problems in any other state. Notice in the above quote that Microsoft says that this feature is best used for applications with long-lived connections that transfer large amounts of data – hopefully your OLTP database is performing lots of short-lived connections and they are not transferring large amounts of data (if they are, I can help you with that!).

Definitely worth a read.

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Changing Identity Start Value

Published 2016-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher has a good post on what happens when you change the seed value of an identity column:

Well Paul told me this wasn’t the case. Now when Paul tells me something I believe him, but I also like to run tests. So I decided to usesys.fn_PhysLocCracker(%%physloc%%). %%physloc%% returns a varbinary that gives you the location of the row. When passed tosys.fn_PhysLocCracker(%%physloc%%) it returns the database file, page in the file, and slot number where the row can be found. So to start with I create an identity(1,1) and I run 20 inserts, one at a time, checking row locations each time. This is to confirm I’m right about this part.

Clicking through is worth it for the hypnotizing animated GIFs.

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Why Force Query Store Plans

Published 2016-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey explains the wherefore behind query store plan forcing:

But, what else does Force Plan do for you? What if you never experience bad parameter sniffing (you do, but I’m not going to argue the point)? Is there something else that Force Plan can do for you? Heck yes! The whole point of creating the Query Store was in order to address Plan Regression. What the heck is plan regression? When Microsoft makes any change to the Query Optimizer, and those changes come all the time, it’s possible that you might see a change in your execution plans. Most of the time, it’s going to be a positive change. That’s why they’re changing the Optimizer after all, to improve it. However, sometimes, you’re benefiting from the old behavior of the Optimizer and that new plan doesn’t work as well as the old plan. This is plan regression. When Microsoft changed the Cardinality Estimation engine in SQL Server 2014, more than a few people experienced the new estimator giving row estimates that resulted in a different execution plan that didn’t perform as well as the old plan. This is plan regression. What to do?

This is a good read.

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Error Handling With Extended Events, Part 2

Published 2016-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason continues his discussion of using Extended Events to handle errors:

In the last post, we explored a couple of examples of using Extended Events to enhance T-SQL error handling. There was some potential there. But a hard-coded SPID was necessary: we couldn’t use the code examples for anything automated. It was cumbersome, too. Let’s change that, shall we?

To make the code easier to work with, I moved most of it into three stored procs: one each to create an XEvent session, get the XEvent session data, and drop the XEvent session. There’s also a table type. This will negate the need to declare a temp table over and over. The four objects can be created in any database you choose. I opted to create them in [tempdb]. The code for each is below in the four tabs.

This is a very interesting solution.

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Automating DMV Scripts

Published 2016-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Sander Stad has a Powershell script to automate using Glenn Berry’s excellent DMV queries:

I’ve used Glenn’s DMV scripts for years but always found them tedious to execute because there are about 70 individual scripts that either query instance or retrieve database information. Glenn did make it easier for you by creating Excel templates to save the information in.
There are separate scripts for each version of SQL Server that updated every month. Glenn only updates the versions for 2012 to 2016 with new features. The scripts are very well documented and even contain hints about how to solve some issues.

Click through for more information on how to install this Powershell module.

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Azure SQL Database Size Quotas

Published 2016-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Dimitri Furman discusses the MAXSIZE property on an Azure SQL Database:

Customers can use this ability to allow scaling down to a lower service objective, when otherwise scaling down wouldn’t be possible because the database is too large.

While this capability is useful for some customers, the fact that the actual size quota for the database may be different from the maximum size quota for the selected service objective can be unexpected, particularly for customers who are used to working with the traditional SQL Server, where there is no explicit size quota at the database level. Exceeding the unexpectedly low database size quota will prevent new space allocations within the database, which can be a serious problem for many types of applications.

One more thing to think about, I suppose.

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Firewall Configuration With Powershell

Published 2016-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin gives an introduction to firewall configuration using Powershell:

The Script has list of adjustable filters:
$Direction – Direction of firewall rule: Inbound or Outbound;
$Action – Action rule performs: Allow or Block;
$Enabled – Status of a rule: Enabled – True or False;
$RuleGroup – Group rule has been assigned. By default script uses “$Null” variable, which filters all rules without assigned group. However you can specify a group a name if necessary;
$DisplayName – Name of a rule. By default I use an expression “*SQL*” to search for rules which have word “SQL” in their name. To retrieve all rules us “*”. To retrieve any particular rule use rule name.

He looks at viewing rules as well as creating, modifying, and deleting them.

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