A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andrea Gnemmi looks at a pair of extensions:
We all know the importance of monitoring our RDBMS to ensure the performance and availability. Are there any tools that provide functionality to better to monitor PostgreSQL databases? In this article we will explore pg_stat_activity and pg_locks.
Click through for an overview of these two extensions and some of the functionality available in them.
Comments closedJess Pomfret looks for old tables:
There are many reasons why you might end up with tables named
something_oldin your database. Perhaps this is part of your decommission strategy, to rename them to make sure they really aren’t in use. Or, it could be because you need to make schema changes, you can rename the current table and create a new table with the desired schema. But, the key to this blog post is when you then forget to come back and clean these tables up. We can easily find them with a dbatools command.
Read on to see how you can use dbatools cmdlets to find and remove these deprecated tables.
Comments closedFederico Campoli deals with a lot of RAM:
Nowadays it’s not uncommon to deal with machines with hundreds of GB of RAM.
Abundant memory can give PostgreSQL a massive performance boost. However things work slightly different than you may expect.
Let’s find out!
Click through for a dive into how PostgreSQL handles memory management.
Comments closedI have noticed new SQL Server database objects have been created and want to know how we can track down who created these objects. What options are available in SQL Server? In this article, learn how in SQL Server to check who created a table or other objects.
Burt shows a couple of techniques for this, though I’d lean heavily on using Extended Events over a server-side trace or Profiler for the task.
Comments closedKevin Hill explains those hidden costs:
Common Excuses That Lead to Expensive Problems:
- “Our system runs fine,”
- “The cloud takes care of it”
- “Our sysadmin is really smart”
- “DBAs are expensive”
Read on for thoughts around why it’s important to have a DBA, and why just having a junior DBA may not be sufficient.
Comments closedChristophe Pettus shares some good advice:
Sometimes, we run into a client who has port 5432 exposed to the public Internet, usually as a convenience measure to allow remote applications to access the database without having to go through an intermediate server appllication.
Do not do this.
This is the equivalent of exposing port 1433 on a SQL Server instance to the broader internet, and is a bad idea for many of the same reasons.
Comments closedSteve Jones shares some thoughts:
A report of cloud Kubernetes usage shows that these resources are being under-utiliized, over-provisioned, and costing more than necessary for many organizations. From the previous year, average CPU declined from 13% to 10%, and memory is used at only around 23%. Companies are over-provisioning their clusters, which is understandable. No one wants to have systems overloaded and users complaining about performance.
Steve goes on to list some of the challenges of running an orchestrator like Kubernetes (or OpenShift or whatever). There’s a lot of code and process behind them, and that can be challenging if you don’t have administrators who know what they’re doing. Even hosting in Azure Kubernetes Service or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service only removes some of the systems management pain. That said, there is a certain level of comfort in knowing that my applications will automatically restart if a problem occurs, so the pain is usually worth it.
Comments closedKevin Hill provides advice for the non-DBA:
It’s a vague but common complaint, frequently with no additional details. Before blindly restarting SQL Server, let’s walk through quick checks that don’t require deep DBA skills.
This should all be easy for a DBA but for a company lacking a DBA, it’s a good starting point for troubleshooting.
Comments closedCraig Kerstiens covers a misunderstood extension:
Citus is in a small class of the most advanced Postgres extensions that exist. While there are many Postgres extensions out there, few have as many hooks into Postgres or change the storage and query behavior in such a dramatic way. Most that come to Citus have very wrong assumptions. Citus turns Postgres into a sharded, distributed, horizontally scalable database (that’s a mouthful), but it does so for very specific purposes.
Read on to learn when Citus can work well, when it isn’t a good fit, and a few architecture and design recommendations around using the extension.
Comments closedHaripriya Naidu wants to know what object this is:
You run a query to check for locking or blocking in SSMS and find a wait resource in the format (8:1:3610). To identify the object name, you would typically run multiple queries, first find database name, turn on trace flag 3604, then find object id from DBCC PAGE and then find object name from sys.objects.
However, with a new function “sys.dm_db_page_info” introduced in SQL Server 2019, you no longer need to go through these steps. Instead, you can run a single query to get the object name directly.
Read on to see how it all works. This is definitely a lot easier than in the olden days.
Comments closed