Category: Administration

The CSS SQL Engineers have a new series called “It Just Runs Faster.”  In their first post, they discuss DBCC improvements:

Internally DBCC CHECK* uses a page scanning coordinator design (MultiObjectScanner.)  SQL Server 2016 changes the internal design to (CheckScanner), applying no lock semantics and a design similar to those used with In-Memory Optimized (Hekaton) objects, allowing DBCC operations to scale far better than previous releases.

Making DBCC checks significantly faster for large databases makes administration that much easier.  I’m looking forward to seeing this.  James Anderson, however, is concerned that things might be worse at the extreme low end.

Michael J Swart has updated the Blocked Process Report Viewer:

The viewer can consume blocked process report events captured by any extended events session as long as that session has a target of ring_buffer or event_file. For example, if you set up your extended events session the way Jeremiah Peschka did in Finding Blocked Processes and Deadlocks using SQL Server Extended Events. Then you would use the viewer like this:

Check out the report.

Rolf Tesmer shows how proportional fill for files in a filegroup works:

When multiple files are involved, and if these are ideally located on different physical spindles on the underlying disk subsystem, then a rather nicely performing data striping can be achieved for the database.  If proportional fill kicks in and starts to focus on files with more free space then you may get hot spots for those files.  However nowadays with auto-tiering SAN’s, SSD and (abstracted) cloud storage (for IaaS deployments) this is beginning to matter less and less.

This is a good introduction to proportional fill, including what happens when you add files later.  If you are counting on proportional fill, it’s a good idea to make sure all files are the same size and grow them all at once.

Jon Morisi has a script to find orphaned users:

With the SQL Server 2005 end date approaching, you may find yourself migrating databases.  One of the gotchas with any database migration is orphaned users.  Below is a script I put together, and have been using for years, to help me resolve issues with orphaned users:

I’m not a fan of the sp_msforeachdb in there because there are issues which can cause “each” database to skip databases.  If you have installation authority, Aaron Bertrand’s sp_foreachdb is a better alternative, and if you need to do Insert/Exec calls, there’s a newer version which removes the INSERT/EXEC in that procedure.

Kevin Eckart shows you users with recent password changes:

There may come a time when you need to generate a list of SQL logins and the last time their password was changed. By using the LOGINPROPERTY of the name in sys.server_principals we can generate such a list.

Note: This will only work with SQL logins.

If you want (or need) to know that passwords are being updated but can’t turn on password policies, this at least answers the initial question.

Erin Stellato troubleshoots a cumulative update installation problem:

The initial email didn’t have a lot of details, so I started asking questions to understand what version was being installed, the environment configuration, etc.  Turns out this was a two-node Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) with multiple SQL Server 2012 instances installed, and one of the instances was still running on the node this person was trying to patch.  To be clear, the two nodes were SRV1 and SRV2, and the instances were PROD-A and PROD-B running on SRV1, and PROD-C which was running on SRV2.  This person was trying to install the cumulative update on SRV2.

The behavior Erin describes is a little bit crazy, but at least there’s a good explanation and way to solve the issue.

Erik Darling has a short checklist of some things to check before upgrading SQL Server 2005:

MIND YOUR COMPATIBILITY LEVEL

When going to 2014 (as of today, 2016’s RTM hasn’t been announced yet), you’ll have to decide whether or not the new cardinality estimator suits you. There’s not a cut and dry answer, you’ll have to test it on your workload. If you’d like some of the more modern SQL features added to your arsenal, you can bump yourself up to 2012-levels to get the majority of them.

The interesting survey would be, among people who still have SQL 2005 installations, how many will move as a result of Microsoft declaring end-of-life for 2005.  My expectation is a fairly low percentage—by this point, I figure a at least a strong minority of 2005 instances are around for regulatory or compliance reasons (e.g., some piece of regulated software was certified only for 2005).