A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jack Vamvas answers a question:
Question: How can I view SQL Server Logging on Linux ?
Answer: SQL Server on Windows – logs details into SQL Server Error logs and Application Logs. Windows event viewer details are available in the Windows Event Logs via the event viewer or Powershell Get-EventLog
The Windows answer is pretty easy for SQL Server DBAs, as we’ve lived in it for so long. Click through for the Linux answer.
Comments closedBrent Ozar has started a retrospective. The first post covers “What would you say you do here?”:
When the database goes down, the business stops. If you’re selling things online, and your web site goes down, that’s an emergency. Even if it’s not down – if it just slows down – that can be an emergency too. DBAs help prevent that problem.
When someone accidentally deletes data, the business can stop. Unfortunately, in all too many companies, there are too many folks with access to that data – and those folks are often untrained. They’re just human, and they make mistakes. Database administrators help recover from that problem.
The second post looks at the lack of progress in many areas:
When I started working with databases, we had to:
– Provision the right CPUs and memory
– Provision the right storage throughput and size
– Install the database
– Configure the database
– Protect it – which sounds easy, but that also includes designing the right high availability and disaster recovery solution
– Design the right tables, and put indexes on them based on how we wanted to query the data
– Write fast, accurate queries to load & retrieve data
– Troubleshoot the whole thing when it went wrongToday, decades later…yeah.
We’re still doing all of that stuff. It’s just that we’re cave-people using rocks for tools instead of banging on things by hand.
I’ve got some thoughts on this but they won’t fit on this stamp. I’ll have to put them together some other day.
Comments closedJess Pomfret explains the value of tags:
One of the vital parts of this learning and experimenting needs to be cleaning up after myself. We all know the risks of leaving things running in Azure- it’s likely to drain your training budget pretty quickly. To be fair, this is also a good lesson for real world scenarios. Getting used to turning off or scaling down resources based on need is a good way to reduce your Azure spend.
This brings me to one morning last week. I logged in to the portal and got a pop up that my credit was down to under $5, which is not what I was expecting. I started looking around and wondering what I’d left running – it isn’t always easy to spot though.
Read on to see how tags can help with this, as well as other forms of cloud governance. If you remember to set them, that is.
Comments closedChris Adkin has two additional parts of a series. Part 3 shows us how to deploy a virtual machine on VMware:
To do this you require an Ubuntu virtual machine, I’ve tested this with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and I will get around to testing it with Ubuntu 20.10 at some stage. If for example the virtual machine was created with a user called azuser, the deployment server should also have an azuser account under which all Terraform commands are executed.
Part 4 takes those VMs and set up a Kubernetes cluster across them:
Whatever you do when deploying a Kubernetes cluster, somewhere along the line you have to use kubeadm. There is a wealth of material available on blog posts and on the internet in general in which people roll there own scripts using kubeadm. I often suspect that many of these efforts are the result of Kelsey Hightower’s: Kubernetes the hard way. In this post we are emphatically going to do things the easy way, […]
And now we’re caught up on the series…for the moment, at least.
Comments closedEitan Blumin takes the data janitor role seriously:
As part of its regular, ongoing, day-to-day activities, your SQL Server instance would naturally collect historical data about its automated operations. If left unchecked, this historical data could pile up, leading to wasted storage space, performance hits, and even worse issues.
MSDB would obviously be collecting data about the SQL Agent job executions. But there are also a few other types of historical data that needs to be cleaned up once in a while. In this blog post, I hope to cover all bases and leave no historical data un-cleaned.
Read on for several data sources which you’ll want to keep tidy.
Comments closedJack Vamvas explains a concept:
I was talking to an Auditor recently – who specialises in large Corporate Audits – and they asked me how would I prove a certain database which is backed up is actually restored to another server. One of the methods I described was using the Log Sequence Numbers (LSN).
Read on for an explanation of how they work and how you can use LSNs to solve that auditing issue.
Comments closedThomas Rushton attempts to preserve extended property history:
Custom extended properties can be a useful tool when creating a self-documenting database. However, in an environment where tables are routinely dropped and recreated by software/systems not within your control, it may be desirable to have these stored so they can be repopulated when the table is recreated.
Read on to learn about the results of each test. Also read on for a use of the term “faff” in its appropriate context.
Comments closedErik Darling tests an assertion:
After my smash hit double diamond post about index tuning, I got a question questioning my assertion that compressed indexes are also compressed in the buffer pool.
Well, this should be quick. A quick question. Eighty hours later.
Click through for the test.
Comments closedSQL Server is a complex beast, with many configuration options that can range from recommended to completely avoided.
Since the release of SQL Server 2016, several options that were recommended post-install have been rolled into the default installation options and no longer need to be done, and similar changes were made with SQL Server 2017. Even so, there are configuration changes we data professionals need to make after installation, during maintenance windows, and sometimes even during operating hours, so here’s a handy list of changes that do and don’t require a restart of your operating system or SQL Server instance.
As Randolph mentions, this set is not conclusive. For example, enabling PolyBase requires a restart of the database engine. I believe enabling ML Services technically does not, though I do out of caution because the back of my mind remembers something weird about the service’s behavior if you don’t restart the database engine, but p > 0 my brain made up the whole thing.
Comments closedMark Wilkinson shares a script with us:
If you are not familiar, SendTo options are those available when you right click on a file/folder in file explorer and select the Send To option in the menu. When you use this option, the currently selected files/folders are passed to the SendTo shortcut as a space delimited list of files and folders. This is important to know so you better understand what needs to be done to read that list.
I can confirm that this works well for deploying script out, especially when they need to go to multiple servers or multiple databases on servers. That functionality takes a bit more effort to write, but combine Mark’s code with Jess’s and you are well on your way.
Comments closed