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Category: Administration

Error Messages during Change Tracking Cleanup

Published 2021-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markum troubleshoots some error messages:

You’re a data professional and you’re trying to keep up with patching a wide range of SQL Server versions and editions. How do you know what’s in the CU and whether you should apply it or not? My favorite way to read up on CUs is to go to SQLServerUpdates and click around there.  It will take you to the latest CU pages as well as give you a way to see previous CUs that are available.

While doing this recently, I discovered this for CU 26 on SQL Server 2017.

These sorts of regressions do slip in, so keep an eye on them before (and after) upgrading. Lee gives us a concreate example of one in a recent CU of SQL Server 2017.

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Managed Instance Failover Groups

Published 2021-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through Azure SQL Managed Instance failover groups:

If you have been following me for a while you will know that I really like the Fail over groups within Azure SQL DB and it is no different to when applying it to Managed Instances. If you want a rock-solid DR plan, this is the way forward.

Remember it’s an abstraction layer on top of the active geo-replication feature, before this we had to do a lot of manual one to one database setups but now this feature simplifies deployment and management of geo-replicated databases at scale. You can initiate failover manually or automatically if there is a massive failure (researching this topic this could mean things from memory leaks to wrong network cables cut during routine hardware decommissioning – you never know, it could happen so plan for it)

Click through to see how to set this up and what failover looks like.

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Fill Factor and When It Matters

Published 2021-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez has a confession to make:

I love SQL Server internals, I do and I just said it.

Why? because thanks to all the tools, documentation and community members that share their knowledge, folks like me can understand how a super complex piece of software like a relational database engine works (or at least a small part of it).

Click through for a discussion of fill factor and one area where Raul thinks it falls short. I’m not sure that I agree but would need to think about it to give a clear explanation as to why.

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Viewing Site-to-Site VPN Logs in Azure

Published 2021-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry troubleshoots a site-to-site VPN issue:

Recently I needed to view the logs from an Azure Site to Site VPN to see why it wasn’t working as expected. When Azure Site to Site VPNs aren’t working as expected the GUI falls apart quickly for troubleshooting.

Log Analytics is where this problem gets solved. Log Analytics is going to allow you to see basically everything that the Azure Network Gateway is doing. Setting the feed up to Log Analytics isn’t as straightforward as it could be, but it is documented in this post.

Read on for some sample queries.

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Alerting on Log Shipping Failures

Published 2021-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andrea Allred is waiting for an e-mail:

I don’t want emails that tell me everything is ok, only when things are bad and I want them to be helpful emails. Not only did I want an alert, I wanted an email with actual information that I can use to make my decisions. Decisions like, can I just apply a few logs to get caught up or did everything burn down and I need to pull a full backup plus all the logs to be up and running again?

This was a task for some super fancy alerts on my agent job.

Click through to see how.

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Azure Network Gateway Logging

Published 2021-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry walks us through gateway logging in Azure:

If you’ve ever set up an Azure Network Gateway for Site to Site or Person to Site VPNing you’ve probably wanted to be able to see logging from the gateway. In the Azure portal, you can see a Logs option, but all it does is tell you to set up log analytics and the link that it gives you is … less than helpful.

Denny, however, has helpful instructions, so check it out.

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Using the Dedicated Admin Connection

Published 2021-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens has the key for the back door:

I got a call this morning from a coworker. One of the database instances was unreachable with the message that the TempDB log file was full. No processes could login and the only way to get things going again might be to restart either server or instance. Restarting the instance should be the last resort, because after a restart SQL Server will plough through all the logfiles to find transactions to either roll forward or roll back. That will take more time that you want. But, we had the famous DAC backdoor installed.

Read on to see how the DAC can save the day.

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SQL Assessment for SQL Server on VMs

Published 2021-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Ebru Ersan announces a new preview:

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to learn if your SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines was configured optimally? Do you have the right options set? Do you have your tempdb on the right disk? Can your queries perform better? All these and more can be answered using the new Azure portal experience on the SQL virtual machine resource page. SQL Assessment feature, once enabled, will evaluate your SQL Server on Azure VM against configuration best practices to determine if your system is healthy and setup for success. This feature is currently in preview. We would love to hear your feedback.

Click through to see it in action.

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