Category: Administration

Rob Sewell has updated his DBA-Database project:

By making use of the dbo.InstanceList in my DBA database I am able to target instances, by SQL Version, OS Version, Environment, Data Centre, System, Client or any other variable I choose. An agent job that runs every night will automatically pick up the instances and the scripts that are marked as needing installing. This is great when people release updates to the above scripts allowing you to target the development environment and test before they get put onto live.

I talked to a lot of people in Hannover and they all suggested that I placed the scripts onto GitHub and after some how-to instructions from a few people (Thank you Luke) I spent the weekend updating and cleaning up the code and you can now find it on GitHub here

Check out his solution, especially if you do not already have an administrative database on your instances.

Dan Taylor shows how to disable SQL Server performance counters using a registry setting:

About 6 or 7 years ago, I had an issue where my SQL Server performance counters were not available when looking within performance monitor. I went thru the steps of unloading and reloading the counters according to Microsoft documentation and by looking at many of the blog posts out there. The performance counters still would not show.

My next step was to dig into the registry and look at the performance counters entry for SQL Server.

I’d have to imagine that the number of good use cases for disabling performance counters is low, but it’s occasionally necessary for troubleshooting.

Sander Stad has a couple of blog posts on working with Windows Server Core edition.  First, what happens if you lose your command prompt?

In my enthusiasm I clicked the “X” on the top right corner. So this happened:

Mayhem! How do I get my command screen back? Reboot?! NO WAY!

After figuring that out, Sander also explains how to perform updates:

The Windows Server Core Edition is a really good option because there aren’t that many binaries as there would be in a full installation. Due to the smaller number of objects you more stability, simplified management, reduced maintenance and a reduced risk to get attacked.

So you have a Windows Server Core Edition installed but want to update the server manually. Maybe this is a virtual machine on your local PC that needs updating and you don’t have WSUS running.

About everything you previously managed using the GUI in Windows is now done with the sconfig. You can edit your server’s name, the domain, network settings, date/time, shutdown the server but also manage the updates.

Admittedly, most Core installations will probably be in environments with a lot of automation around them, but sometimes you’re just doing a one-off thing.

Jon Morisi steps in to show how to set up a linked server connection to an Oracle database:

In this dialog box, the “TNS Service Name” drop down box should display your entries from the tnsnames.ora file.  Next, enter your Oracle User ID and click “Test Connection”, at which point you’ll be prompted for your password.  Everything should test successfully at this point.

Now would be a good time to restart.  Unfortunately, yes you need to restart…

You can do an additional test via sqlplus.  Open a windows command prompt and enter the following:

sqlplus user/pass@[addressname]

(Where addressname is one of your connections from tnsnames.ora)

I readily admit that I’m glad I don’t need to work with Oracle.  Nonetheless, if you do need to integrate the two, this step-by-step guide will show you how.

SQL Sasquatch looks at a scenario in which large sorts or hash operations can cause CPU to skew compared to page lookups per second:

The graph above has tempdb footprint (light blue) stacked on top of used query memory (dark blue) against the left vertical axis.  The green period has very limited use of query memory.  During the yellow period, a moderate amount of query memory was used.  During the red period, a large amount of query memory was used and at a number of points operations spilled into tempdb.  As query memory was used more extensively, the CPU:lookups/sec correlation was more disrupted.

Once fully considered, this makes sense: query memory is “stolen” from the database page buffer pool.  References to pages in the page pool are “page lookups”, but each time stolen query memory is poked and prodded… well, that’s not a page lookup.  But it has CPU cost.

Check out the whole thing; this is a thoughtful look at an interesting data oddity.

Matt Slocum warns against having too many server-side traces running:

Before the client took the last ditch effort of just restarting SQL Server, I checked traces.  There were 9 user traces collecting a ton of trace events.

I manually killed them all and suddenly performance returned to normal.  Phew!  Crisis averted.

As a follow up from that issue, I created a script that stops and then deletes all user traces.  We are discussing setting up a job to run this script periodically to keep traces at bay and I am educating the group on proper trace discipline (and Extended Events).

Even Extended Events aren’t free, so the same advice applies.