Category: Administration

David Fowler looks for the biggest, meanest database on a SQL Server instance:

I’m sure we’ve all been there at some point, sometimes it’s easy to tell. We might only have a handful of databases on the server with one known to be the heaviest utilised. But sometimes things might not be so obvious, there could be a large numbers of databases or no obvious resource hog.

In those instances we need some way to figure out what how much time each database is spending on the CPU if that’s what we’re interested in or perhaps the total number of page reads or writes if IO is our problem.

Read on for one way to do this, assuming that the instance has been up long enough to give you reliable results.

Tom Collins has some guidance for us:

-The Hashicorp database secrets engine (database secrets engine) supports a plugin for SQL Server 

-It supports root credential rotation, dynamic roles , static roles , username customization 

-Vault needs to be configured a user that at minimum :

Click through for those configuration notes.

David Klee answers a question for the ages:

Have you ever wondered why Windows Server doesn’t show disk performance metrics in Task Manager, but your Windows 10/11 OS does? It’s a really silly difference.

I have indeed wondered this and David has a good solution to the problem.

Chad Callihan looks at buffer pool extension:

Perhaps you started out with X amount of memory when your SQL server was brought online and over time, with additional load and activity on that SQL server, users are not quite getting the type of performance they’re used to getting. Sure, you can buy more memory. What if that’s not an option?

If you’re running low on memory and need a little boost, enabling buffer pool extension can take advantage of an SSD as an “extension” for the buffer pool.

This is one of those interesting features that probably help a small number of customers but shouldn’t be generally useful. That’s because even with SSD performance improvements, memory is still a couple orders of magnitude faster, so as long as you have the ability to increase RAM, that brings much better performance.

Jamie Wick exports some data:

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution that our Linux team has been using for several years. More recently, we began using it for our Windows-based servers too. (I’ll post a writeup about Prometheus in the future)

One of the obstacles to implementing Prometheus monitoring on our Windows servers was finding and installing an agent. We ultimately decided to use the windows_exporter agent available in the Prometheus Community on GitHub. The exporter is free to use under an MIT license and supports an extensive list of WMI metrics that are grouped into Collectors.

Read on for more info, including ways to avoid common errors.