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Category: Administration

Using Registered Server Groups

Published 2016-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill shows a good use case for registered server groups:

In my last post I hoped to convince you to pay attention to all of the various “Login Failed for user…” messages that you see in your SQL Server ERRORLOGS.   ALL of them.

Yes, some you can ignore based on the environment or the person.   Jim the web guy on a Dev box is just not that much of a security threat (unless you let him touch Prod, but that’s a different post).

Some of you have one or two servers, and reviewing ERRORLOGs is no big deal to do manually.  More of you have tens and tens of them.   Some of you have thousands (I’m looking at you in Managed Hosting environments such as Verizon, Rackspace, etc. where customers pay you to do this).

The next step up from there is Central Management Servers.

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Dropping Masking From A Column

Published 2016-08-05 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows how to drop Dynamic Data Masking from a column:

This is a quick one. As I experimented with Dynamic Data Masking for the Stairway to Dynamic Data Masking, and writing my Using SQL Compare with Dynamic Data Masking, I needed to remove masking from a column. I didn’t want to rebuild tables, and hoped there was an easy way to ALTER a column.

There is.

The more I’ve seen of DDM, the less I like it.  So I’m more a fan of scripts to remove it than scripts to add it…

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ODBC Driver 13.1

Published 2016-08-05 by Kevin Feasel

The SQL Server Blog reports that the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server has been updated to version 13.1:

Always Encrypted

You can now use Always Encrypted with the Microsoft ODBC Driver 13.1 for SQL Server. Always Encrypted is a new SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database security feature that prevents sensitive data from being seen in plaintext in a SQL instance. You can now transparently encrypt the data in the application, so that SQL Server or Azure SQL Database will only handle the encrypted data and not plaintext values. If a SQL instance or host machine is compromised, an attacker can only access ciphertext of your sensitive data. Use the ODBC Driver 13.1 to encrypt plaintext data and store the encrypted data in SQL Server 2016 or Azure SQL Database. Likewise, use the driver to decrypt your encrypted data.

Check out the full list  of new features at the link above.

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DNS Aliases

Published 2016-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele shows us how to use CNAME records to give us easy aliases for servers hosting SQL Server:

When you connect to a SQL Server instance, you’re most likely connecting directly to the host name of the server running that instance. So for example, if the host name of my instance is SQLSERVER-A, then in my SSMS connection (or application) I probably type in a host name offully qualified domain name (FQDN) of a server. If I want to move a database from one server to another, or stand up a new server and move everything over to it, from now on I’ll need to make sure I type in the new host name. And for a DBA, this is fine. We mostly identify our servers by the hosts they run on.

Developers and users, on the other hand, don’t always think like that. They each probably only care about one or two databases on a given instance, and depending on their release cycle even something as simple as changing a connection string might need to be a scheduled change. So when databases move or you build a new server you not only need to ensure as little downtime as possible from a system perspective but with as little impact to a user’s system too. And you can do that with the help of your network team and your local domain name system: DNS.

I’ve had great experiences with CNAME records masking actual server names.  This was most relevant in an environment in which devs just couldn’t remember which X-Men character was the production SQL Server and  which was QA.

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Shredding Event Data

Published 2016-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall has a script to shred extended events:

In the following script, I have tried to accomplish just that – a single script to create the entire XML parser for me, for you, and for anybody wishing to use it. I don’t want to have to remember the subtle nuances of how to parse each of the events each time I need to parse the session data. I want something that is quick, easy, and repeatable.

With all of that said, here is the script that I now use to parse my session data. You should notice that it has been simplified and is more extensive now.

Jason also has sample usage.  Check this out for sure.

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Azure Data Lake ACLs

Published 2016-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Saveen Reddy introduces file and folder level Access Control Lists for Azure Data Lake storage:

We’ve emphasized that Azure Data Lake Store is compatible with WebHDFS. Now that ACLs are fully available, it’s important to understand the ACL model in WebHDFS/HDFS because they are POSIX-style ACLs and not Windows-style ACLs.  Before we five deep into the details on the ACL model, here are key points to remember.

  • POSIX-STYLE ACLs DO NOT ALLOW INHERITANCE. For those of you familiar with POSIX ACLs, this is not a surprise. For those coming from a Windows background this is very important to keep in mind. For example, if Alice can read files in folder /foo, it does not mean that she can rad files in /foo/bar. She must be granted explicit permission to /foo/bar. The POSIX ACL model is different in some other interesting ways, but this lack of inheritance is the most important thing to keep in mind.

  • ADDING A NEW USER TO DATA LAKE ANALYTICS REQUIRES A FEW NEW STEPS. Fortunately, a portal wizard automates the most difficult steps for you.

This is an interesting development.

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Automating Patching?

Published 2016-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little takes on the question of whether patching should be automated on SQL Server instances:

I used to spend a lot of time doing patching, and I had plenty of times when:

  • Servers wouldn’t come back up after a reboot. Someone had to go into the iLo/Rib card and give them a firm shove

  • Shutdown took forever. SQL Server can be super slow to shut down! I understand this better after reading a recent post on the “SQL Server According to Bob” blog. Bob Dorr explains that when SQL Server shuts down, it waits for all administrator (sa) level commands to complete. So, if you’ve got any servers where jobs or applications are running as sa, well….  hope they finish up fast.

  • Patching accidentally interrupted something important. Some process was running from an app server, etc, that failed because patching rebooted the server, and it fired off alarms that had to be cleaned up.

  • Something failed during startup after reboot. A service started and failed, or a database wasn’t online.  (Figuring out “was that database offline before we started?” was the first step. Ugh.)

  • Miscommunication caused a problem on a cluster.  Whoops, you were working on node2 while I was working on node1? BAD TIMES.

This is a really good post.  Kendra’s done a lot more patching than I have, and she’s definitely though about it in more detail.  Me, I’m waiting for the day—which is very close for some companies—in which you don’t patch servers.  Instead, you spin up and down virtual apps and virtual servers which are fully patched.  It’s a lot harder to do with databases compared to app servers, but if you separate data from compute, your compute centers are interchangeable.  When a new OS patch comes out, you spin up new machines which have this patch installed, they take over for the old ones, and after a safe period, you can delete the old versions forever.  If there’s a failure, shut down the new version, spin back up the old version, and you’re back alive.

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Logging WhoIsActive Output

Published 2016-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Tara Kizer has a primer on storing WhoIsActive outputs for subsequent analysis:

Create a new job and plop the below code into the job step, modifying the first 3 variables as needed. The code will create the logging table if it doesn’t exist, the clustered index if it doesn’t exist, log current activity and purge older data based on the @retention variable.

How often should you collect activity? I think collecting sp_WhoIsActive data every 30-60 seconds is a good balance between logging enough activity to troubleshoot production problems and the storage needed to keep the data in a very busy environment.

I like having something like this in place because often times, when you need these results, it’s already too late.

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Upgrades And Regressions

Published 2016-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little explains when upgrades can cause performance to suffer:

The cluster’s servers and SQL Server configurations were built to be as close to identical as possible to the previous instance (memory, cores, disk, maxdop, CTP, etc).

After the migration, I noticed that CPU utilization jumped from the normal 25% to a consistent 75%.

I did several other migrations with similar server loads with no issues, so I’m a bit puzzled as to what might be going on here. Could the upgrade from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 simply be exposing bad queries that 2008 was handling differently?

Kendra goes through a number of reasons, building a troubleshooting guide in the process.  This is a great read.

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