A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Adrian Buckman has an announcement:
As always the code can be found here in our github repo
We updated our sample report hereWe forgot to mention V2.5! We added the ability to add Thresholds per drive for the drivespace module.#270
In addition to this, click through for a dozen additional bugfixes and changes.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino won’t let this container run amok:
Docker gives you the ability to control a container’s access to CPU, Memory, and network and disk IO using resource constraints, sometimes called Limits. You define limits as parameters when creating containers. In its default configuration, a container will have no resource constraints for accessing resources of the host operating system. This post will look at how to configure resource constraints in Docker and look at how SQL Server sees the resources when CPU and Memory resource constraints are in place.
In this post, we will focus on using CPU and Memory Limits using the parameters
--cpus <value>and--memory <value>. These provide the essential resource controls for access to CPU and Memory available on the host. If you want to dive deep into the various types of resource constraints available in Docker, check out this page https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/resource_constraints/. The goal of this post is to introduce the SQL Server DBA into resource constraints in containers.
Read on to learn how you can use CPU and memory limits to control resource allocation for SQL Server containers—including at runtime.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher needs bad things done fast:
We recently had an application login (SQL Server authenticated) in one of our training environments start locking out on a regular basis. I won’t go into why other than to say we did resolve it eventually. This was a major problem that escalated rather quickly up our management chain. We needed to solve it ASAP. And because of that we needed not only a long term solution but a short term one as well. The short term solution involved creating a script that unlocked the login (if it’s currently locked) and sticking it in a job that runs every 5 minutes.
Note: This is not something you should be doing in production! This creates a major security hole.
The process itself isn’t, strictly speaking, a bad idea—for example, maybe you’re testing out some integration and accidentally lock the account. The bad idea is more the script to keep doing this every few minutes.
Comments closedJeffrey Hicks has a use for the Powershell ISE:
Way back before the days of PowerShell Core, or even VS Code for that matter, the PowerShell ISE was the center of my PowerShell world. I spent a lot of time finding ways to make it easier for me to use and to push it to its limits. Naturally, the PowerShell ISE doesn’t play much of a role for me these days. But that may not be true for you. In fact, one area where the ISE can be useful is with remote sessions.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedJoy George Kunjikkur enumerates reasons why you might want to use Kubernetes to host applications:
I started writing this post 2-3 years back. Mainly when Apache Spark 2.3 started supporting Kubernetes (K8s) in 2018. It was obvious that Kubernetes is taking over app hosting space the same way virtual machines took over physical machines. All are expected to understand where the industry is moving and adopt. Hence I paused this post as there is nothing I need to endorse. But it’s time to resume this post and publish it.
Click through for a slew of thoughts on the topic.
Comments closedLee Markum needs to do log shipping in bulk:
I recently needed to configure log shipping for multiple databases at once as part of a migration project. I turned to PowerShell to do this.
But before we get to that part, this post assumes that you’ve done the upfront work to create shares for the backups to write to and for the backups to be copied to. This will involve providing the right permissions for the SQL Server service accounts involved in Log Shipping. If you are not familiar with this, that’s perfectly fine. Check out this article in MS Docs first.
Click through for the next steps in the process, including a well-timed Get-Help call.
Mark Wilkinson combines Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana:
Lots of folks wonder why I would go through the trouble of building out a system when so many vendors have already solved the problem of collecting baseline metrics. The answer at the time was simple: cost. With my setup I could monitor close to 600 instances (including dev) for $3,000 USD per year. That includes data retention of ~2 years! Are there some administration costs as far as my time is concerned? Of course. In the begining things were a little rough as I learned more about InfluxDB, but once things were configured correctly the most work I’ve had to do is to expand the size of the data drive as we started collecting more metrics.
Click through for more info and check out the GitHub repo.
Comments closedJack Vamvas answers a question:
Question: I’m attempting to create a backup of a SQL Server read only database , but getting an error message – BACKUP LOG cannot be performed because there is no current database backup
Why is this happening and are there any workarounds?
Read on to understand the problem, as well as the red herring in the question.
Comments closedChad Callihan lost a transaction log file in a boating accident:
What if you’re moving a database to a new server by detaching and re-attaching database files and someone (not you of course) loses the log file? What if an old database needs to be brought online but the person coming to you only has an mdf file? Can you still attach the database in these scenarios? Let’s find out.
Read on for the answers.
Comments closedDavid Klee creates some files:
Do you have quite large MDF files on your database? By large, I mean hundreds of gigabytes (or larger). Have you ever noticed that your SQL Server disk stall metrics for these data files are much higher than the storage latency metrics exhibited on the underlying operating system layer? It could be that your SQL Server data files are being hammered too hard and you don’t have enough data files to help the SQL Server storage engine distribute the load. We do this for tempdb, right? Why don’t we do this enough for our user databases as well? It’s easy for a brand-new database from day zero, but what about existing databases that have grown out of control with a single data file attached? Let me show you how to adjust this for existing databases without an outage!
Check it out. This is a part of database administration I’d never really thought much about, so it often ended up being a blind spot for me.
Comments closed