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Category: Administration

Network Configuration with Powershell

Patrick Gruenauer shows how to configure network settings on a Windows machine using Powershell:

Today I would like to give a tutorial for a basic network configuration on Windows systems using PowerShell. We start with a fresh installation of a Windows operating system.

Read on for a fairly simple example, one which lays out the foundation for more complicated scenarios such as configuring networking settings for an Availability Group.

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Ignoring Backups in the SQL Server Error Log

Garry Bargsley has a solution to an annoyance:

Whether you are new to SQL Server or a seasoned veteran, you will notice odd behavior in the SQL Server Error Log. When a database backup is performed, an entry is put into the SQL Error Log. The SQL Server team decided to log successful backup messages to the Error Log. If you ask most technology professionals, you will find that logging successful events are not really a common occurrence.  This behavior causes a bloated Error Log that can make it hard to find what you need quickly.

Luckily, that same SQL Server team built in a solution to this situation.

Read on to see what the solution is, as well as how to use it.

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sqltop — SQL Server Process Viewer

Mark Wilkinson has a big announcement:

Hey folks! I’m proud to announce the first open source release of my sqltop tool! sqltop is an interactive command-line based tool to view active sessions on a SQL Server instance. In this post I’ll talk about why I wrote the tool, why I chose to write it in PowerShell, and walk through some of the challenges I faced during development.

I’ve had a chance to see this in action and it’s really cool. I’m glad Mark was able to get this open-sourced, so go check it out.

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Running SQL Server Containers from Scratch

Andrew Pruski tells us there is no spoon:

I’ve been interested (obsessed?) with running SQL Server in containers for a while now, ever since I saw how quick and easy it was to spin one up. That interest has led me down some rabbit holes for the last few years as I’ve been digging into exactly how containers work.

The weirdest concept I had to get my head around was that containers aren’t actually a thing.

Containers are just processes running on a host that implement a set of Linux constructs in order to achieve isolation.

So if we know what constructs are used…shouldn’t we be able to build our own container from scratch?

Read on as Andrew breaks out the three necessary constructs and dives into it.

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The Basics of Finding Blocking

Alex Stuart has a way to find blocked processes:

So we need monitoring and alerting on it. Enterprise monitoring tools can do this, and do it well – but if you don’t have one, or don’t have enough licenses for your entire estate, you’ll need to roll your own. (OK, or copy someone else’s if you don’t need the learnin’). This post will demonstrate a basic method for detecting blocking and alerting based on a given threshold.

Read on for the process.

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Types of Memory Contention

Erik Darling is overdrawn at the memory bank (which was, sadly, not a very good MST3K episode):

Whomever decided to give “memory bank” its moniker was wise beyond their years, or maybe they just made a very apt observation: all memory is on loan.

Even in the context we’ll be talking about, when SQL Server has lock pages in memory enabled, the pages that are locked in memory may not have permanent residency.

If your SQL Server doesn’t have enough memory, or if various workload elements are untuned, you may hit one of these scenarios:

There are three of them, which is really that there are two of them but they can join forces in an effort to make your life a pain.

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Tracking Query Compile Time

Grant Fritchey doesn’t have time to wait:

A question that came up recently was how to track the query compile time. It’s actually a pretty interesting question because, there aren’t that many ways to tell how long it took to compile the query, and they don’t necessarily agree. For most of us, most of the time, compile time for a given query doesn’t matter. However, I love telling the story of the query I had on an old system that could run in 90ms, but took 5 minutes to compile. In short, sometimes compile time matters.

Read on to learn several ways to determine how long it took that query to compile.

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Event Log Mining with Powershell

Jeffrey Hicks proffers some advice:

The other day someone who is learning PowerShell reached out to me with a problem. He couldn’t understand why the relatively simple PowerShell expression to pull information from the System event log wasn’t working. He wasn’t seeing errors, but he also wasn’t seeing the events he was expecting. Searching event logs with PowerShell is a common task. But as you’ll see, you may need to update your approach to mining event logs with PowerShell. Things change in the PowerShell world, and sometimes in subtle ways that you may not notice. Although to be fair, some of these changes my arise from new versions of the .NET Framework and/or Windows 10. Here’s what we encountered.

Read on to learn a more efficient technique for this process.

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