Category: Administration

Slava Murygin walks through running SQL Server on Windows Server core.  First, the steps for installing SQL Server at the command line:

There are three reasons why Windows Server with Core is better than Server with a GUI:
1. Security: Core has less features. That means less surface for intruders to attack.
2. Management: No unnecessary updates and planned reboots.
3. Resource consumption: Less memory usage and less CPU overhead

Even if you aren’t using Windows Server Core, it’s a good idea to be able to script out your SQL Server installation so you can automate it later (or at least so you don’t forget options and have some servers look different than others).

Second, Slava notes that certain features are not compatible with Windows Server core:

The following error occurred:
You have selected a feature that is not supported on Windows Server Core.
The supported features on Windows Server Core are:
Database Engine Services,
SQL Server Replication,
Full-Text and Semantic Extractions for Search,
Analysis Services,
Client Tools Connectivity,
Integration Services,
and SQL Client Connectivity SDK.

That list is a bit more limiting than I’d like, to be honest.

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Sean McCown has a script to truncate log files:

I want to show you a great piece of code to truncate and shrink all your log files. The biggest question you always ask is why should you shrink your log files? It’s been drilled into everyone’s head that shrinking log files is bad because you can cause too many VLFs, and of course there’s the zeroing out that happens when they grow.
OK, so let’s answer that question. There are a couple reasons you’d want to shrink all the files to a small size.

Regularly shrinking log files in production isn’t a particularly great thing, but as Sean points out, there are valid reasons for doing this.

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SQL Sasquatch explains what “max server memory” does and how it relates to private bytes:

Well, there’s obviously a relationship between private bytes and “total server memory”.  The peaks and valleys occur at the same time.   But there’s a delta between them, and the delta isn’t constant.

The difference between private bytes and “total server memory” is pretty well confined, too – not varying more than 10 mb in this interval.

Read the whole thing.

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Erik Darling doesn’t like (most) DBCC commands:

Not what they do, just that the syntax isn’t consistent (do I need quotes around this string or not?), the results are a distraction to get into a usable table, and you need to write absurd loops to perform object-at-a-time data gathering. I’m not talking about running DBCC CHECKDB (necessarily), or turning on Trace Flags, or any cache-clearing commands — you know, things that perform actions — I mean things that spit tabular results at you.

I completely agree.  One of the nicest things about SQL is that I can use the same syntax to read metadata that I can data.  DBCC commands are a jarring difference.

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Kendra Little walks through a fairly simple but very useful change management template:

Good Change Management makes your team smarter. When you change things a lot, things are going to break sometimes. If you’ve done a good change request, you’ll know exactly what to do when something breaks: either you’ll roll the change back, or have a Plan B to execute on. Good change requests also mean that business owners understand the risks of the changes and have approved them, and that teammates have reviewed them: good changes aren’t done in isolation.

Change Management isn’t just for IT. If you’re a developer who deploys changes to production, you need this as well.

Change management doesn’t need to be a complex endeavor.  It should, however, give you enough information to save yourself if things get crazy.

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Dave Mason shows how to retrieve WMI information (perhaps the “wrong” way):

In another post I explored a way to run WMI queries from tsql (sort of). Let’s do it again. The script below enables xp_cmdshell, runs WMIC.exe (capturing the output to a temp table), shreds the XML, returns a result set of columns and rows, and disables xp_cmdshell. If you’re adventurous and daring, run the script in a test environment.

With Powershell, as Dave mentioned, this really isn’t the best way to do the job, but there are times when you aren’t able to use Powershell.

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