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Category: Administration

A Primer on Multi-Server SQL Agent Administration

Published 2020-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski gives us a glimpse at the power of MSX/TSX:

The MSX (master server) can be used to define SQL Agent jobs that then will be pushed over to one or more TSX (target servers). It is possible to see the server is either MSX or TSX when looking at SQL Agent in SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer. The master server can be identified by (MSX) next to the SQL Server Agent. It will also have two subfolders under the Job folder: Local Jobs (for regular jobs) and Multi-Server Jobs.

This is something woefully few database administrators take advantage of. As the number of servers you have to mange increases, ensuring consistency in SQL Agent jobs becomes more and more difficult. MSX/TSX admittedly has some rough edges, but the tool does a lot.

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FAIL_PAGE_ALLOCATION in SQL Server

Published 2020-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Eric Cobb diagnoses an ugly issue:

I recently ran into a situation where a new SQL Server would crash hard every time it would get under a load.

Here is a synopsis of what we were seeing:

This is a physical server and has 512GB of RAM installed. We have SQL Server 2016 installed, and fully patched (SP2 CU15 at this time). When load testing the server, it would start throwing errors such as:

“Failed allocate pages: FAIL_PAGE_ALLOCATION”

and

“There is insufficient system memory in resource pool ‘default’ to run this query.”

and

“Failed to allocate BUFs”

It would then write a memory dump to the log, and in most cases the server would become completely unresponsive and would have to be rebooted.

Read on to learn under what conditions this happens as well as the solution to the problem.

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Considerations Before using SQL Server on Containers

Published 2020-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Joy George Kunjikkur wants you to slow your roll a little:

It is easy to get started on development and simple testing using SQL containers. It was discussed in the previous post. But before putting into production and start developing real applications we had to make sure the below things at least.

Read on for those considerations. I think they are reasonable and generally agree with the bottom-line conclusion.

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Query Processor Ran Out of Internal Resources

Published 2020-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Galbraith troubleshoots a problem:

 Unfortunately a common error in many of our client environments is this:

—

Error: 8623, Severity: 16, State: 1.

The query processor ran out of internal resources and could not produce a query plan. This is a rare event and only expected for extremely complex queries or queries that reference a very large number of tables or partitions. Please simplify the query. If you believe you have received this message in error, contact Customer Support Services for more information.–There are many potential causes for this, and the text of this particular error is very well-written because the primary cause is exactly what is listed – a complex query.

Read on to see how to find this complex query, as well as a few examples of complex queries.

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Purging the SSIS Catalog

Published 2020-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Schott extends Tim Mitchell’s work:

I wrote about cleaning up the SSIS Catalog a while back, but needed to revisit this recently for a different use and needed something that can run in an ongoing manner. My earlier post still works, but I recently adapted some code from Tim Mitchell to create a stored procedure that can do that cleanup. Tim wrote the majority of this. I adapted it to wrap it in a stored procedure to handle varying batch sizes for the deletes as well as to ensure all of the tables are deleted in smaller sets of rows.

Here is the code to create the stored procedure. If your SSIS Catalog is not named SSISDB, adjust accordingly.

Click through for the script. It’s interesting to note how frequently cleanup processes for functionality in SQL Server is inadequate for the task at scale. I’ve regularly seen people write these sorts of things for SSISDB, Query Store, replication, ML Services (though that, at least, was changed), etc.

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SSAS Performance Counters to Monitor

Published 2020-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Wright takes us through a set of SQL Server Analysis Services performance counters we should track:

That said, I wanted to provide some updates with more of a focus on Tabular mode, as it has clearly become the new standard for how most organizations deploy SSAS. I recommend referring to that original series for a focus on Multidimensional mode, but much of the information provided in this blog post will be applicable to both modes. I recommend referencing Allen White’s blog post on SQL Server counters to learn more about many of the Windows-level counters that apply across the board, as I won’t speak to them here.

Let’s dive into the 15 SSAS performance counters you should be monitoring.

Click through for the set, as well as explanations for why.

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Recommendations for Hosting SQL Server on VMware

Published 2020-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Michelle Gutzait walks us through recommendations on hosting SQL Server in Windows on VMware:

VMware has created a very detailed best-practice document for us, specifically for SQL Server. You may find the latest one here.

In case the link doesn’t work for you, or you have a different version of VMware, you can search for the proper SQL Server best practices on the VMware site.

Here are the main best practices VMware recommends, and the most important based on Pythian’s experience (SQL Server on Windows):

Click through for a detailed checklist.

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Installing an Always On Availability Group in SQL Server 2019

Published 2020-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Daniel takes us through the process of setting up an Always On Availability Group in SQL Server 2019:

With SQL Server 2012 Microsoft introduced the AlwaysOn Availability Group feature, and since then many changes and improvements have been made.  This article is an update to our previous article https://www.sqlrx.com/steps-for-installing-sql-server-alwayson-availability-groups/ , and will cover the prerequisites and steps for installing AlwaysOn in your SQL Server 2019 environment.

Click through for a checklist of pre-requisites and installation + configuration steps.

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Detecting Spinlock Contention in SQL Server

Published 2020-10-29 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart walks us through spinlock contention:

When that occurred, the number of batch requests that the server could handle dropped significantly. So we saw more CPU use, but less work was getting done.

The high demand kept the CPU at 100% with no relief until the demand decreased. When that happened, the database seemed to recover. Throughput was restored and the database’s metrics became healthy again. During this trouble we looked at everything including the number of spins reported in the sys.dm_os_spinlock_stats dmv.

The spins and backoffs reported seemed extremely high, especially for the category “XVB_LIST”, but we didn’t really have a baseline to tell whether those numbers were problematic. Even after capturing the numbers and visualizing them we saw larger than linear increases as demand increased, but were those increases excessive?

Read on for the answer.

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