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Category: Administration

Availability Groups And VMs

Published 2016-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

John Martin looks at combining Availability Groups with a virtualized environment:

Much of the time there is a systems team and a DBA team, and when the DBAs need to build out a new set of SQL Servers, they request X number of virtual servers from the systems team. The servers are handed over and the DBA team works its magic, and then we have our Failover Cluster Instance or Availability Group High Availability solution. But, is it really Highly Available?

The reason I ask is twofold:

  • Which physical hosts are your Virtual Machines are located on?
  • Which data stores are your virtual disks are located in?

If the answer to either of these questions results in the same answer for any of your Virtual Machines in an Availability Group, or Failover Cluster Instance for that matter. Then you potentially have a massive flaw in your implementation that can affect availability.

The moral of the story is to communicate with the network administrators and SAN folks.

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Memory Pressure

Published 2016-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton walks us through determining if there’s memory pressure on an instance:

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that I’ve done the rownumbering in reverse order, and added a dummy (RowNum 0) field at the top of the list – this is to make sure that, if the most recent record is a RESOURCE_MEMPHYSICAL_LOW record, that we can get results that include that value.

This all looks OK in theory. But we’re still getting stupidly high values for the SecondsPressure field, and wait – what’s this? Multiple ring buffer records with the same ID?

More importantly, he shows us how bad the situation is:  is this something that happened for a couple of seconds, or is it persistent?  This is a great walkthrough.

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Using The DAC

Published 2016-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Andrea Allred shows us how to use the DAC:

The DAC, what is it? It is the Dedicated Administrator Console. Basically it is a way to connect to your SQL Server when all the other connections are tied up. But it takes a little bit of pre-planning so that you can use it when things go bad with your SQL Server.  Let’s enable it so you can test using it and know that it is there in the future.

This is your “get out of jail free” card when the instance is completely unresponsive.  A small amount of memory is dedicated to the DAC so that even if anything else is locked up, you have a chance to fix the problem short of a reboot.

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NUMA With Few Cores

Published 2016-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry asks and answers the question of how many NUMA nodes we should use on a server with a large amount of RAM but relatively few cores:

For this example, let’s assume that we have a physical server with 512 Gigs of RAM and two physical NUMA nodes (and two CPU sockets). We have a VM running in that machine which has a low CPU requirement, but a large working set. Because of this we have 4 cores and 360 Gigs of RAM presented to the VM.

The answer is not trivial, making this an interesting question.

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Database In Recovery

Published 2016-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

James Anderson had a database which would drop into In Recovery mode a few times throughout the day:

The database in question wasn’t stuck in recovery, it would slip in and out of the status throughout the day. Normally, I would only ever expect to see a database in recovery during a restore or after a service restart. Once recovery is complete, I would not expect to see the database slip into ‘in recovery’ again. I especially wouldn’t expect a database to keep slipping in and out of recovery.

The answer is a true head-slapper.  Whose head, I’ll leave up to you…

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Graphing CPU Utilization

Published 2016-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin uses spatial data types to graph CPU utilization on a SQL Server instance:

That diagram provides you about 260 last minutes of Server CPU usage and measured in percents.

As you can see my SQL Server is mostly doing nothing and only during that blog-post writing in the last half and hour or so it is heavily running test scripts to over-utilize my CPU, but it still barely goes more than 60% of CPU (Blue line).

The Red line represents all other processes besides of SQL Server and you can tell if anything else from outside is impacting your performance.

Combined with Glenn Berry’s diagnostic queries, you could generate some quick analytics.  I’d still use R for anything more than slightly complicated, but this is great for those environments in which you don’t have good alternative tooling.

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Reorganize Columnstore Indexes

Published 2016-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new script available to reorganize columnstore indexes:

Note that this script requires SQL Server 2016 (or later) because the database engine team made some great changes to columnstore indexes, allowing us to use REORGANIZE to clear out deleted rows and compact row groups together, as well as its previous job of marking open delta stores as available for compression.

The code is available as a Gist for now, at least until I decide what to do with it.  Comments are welcome, especially if I’m missing a major reorganize condition.

As mentioned, comments are welcome.

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Index Cannot Be Reorganized

Published 2016-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall digs into an error where page-level locking is disabled:

You receive the error message similar to the following:

Msg 2552, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The index “blah” (partition 1) on table “blah_blah_blah” cannot be reorganized because page level locking is disabled

Immediately, you start double-checking yourself and verifying that it worked the previous night. You even go so far as to confirm that the same index was previously reorganized. How is it possible that it is failing now on this index. What has changed? Has something changed?

There’s an interesting troubleshooting story, but the important message is about setting up a good set of Extended Events so that you can troubleshoot these types of problems.

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Querying Active Directory From SQL Server

Published 2016-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Adams shows us how to use OPENROWSET and OPENQUERY to connect to a domain controller and query Active Directory using LDAP:

In the code below, the first thing we do is enable Ad Hoc Distributed Queries so we can try out the OPENROWSET method.  The advantage to this method is not having a linked server and being able to call it directly out of TSQL.  Once we have that enabled we write our query and you’ll notice that we are essentially doing 2 queries.  The first query is the LDAP query inside the OPENROWSET function.  Once those results are returned we are using another query to get what we want from the result set.  Here is where I want you to stop and think about things.  If my LDAP query pulls back 50 attributes, or “columns” in SQL terms, and I tell it I only want 10 of them, what did I just do?  I brought back a ton of extra data over the wire for no reason because I’m not planning to use it.  What we should see here is that the columns on both SELECT statements are the same.  They do not, however, have to be in the same order.  The reason for that is because LDAP does not guarantee to return results in the same order every time.  The attribute or “column” order in your first SELECT statement determines the order of your final result set.  This gives you the opportunity to alias anything if you need to.

You can query LDAP using SELECT statements, but the syntax isn’t T-SQL, so in my case, it was a bit frustrating getting the data I wanted out of Active Directory because I was used to T-SQL niceties.  Nevertheless, this is a good way of pulling down AD data.

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