In a previous entry I talked about how you should pressure management to purchase SQL Server monitoring tools. This in my eyes is important for more than just the fact you can see quickly when you have problems on your instances but also because we as any associate working for the company that was kind enough to employ us is a business entity. That means we need the business to run with minimal costs associated with it.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Part of our jobs as DBA’s is to be proactive on performance issues that may come up. That being said there are a few things I do as a DBA by nature when I either come into an environment as a new DBA or place a new instance in the environment I’ve been maintaining for a period of time. Those things are setting a few traces on SQL Server to be default, so I know of the problems before they are serious performance issues.
Today started off around 12:03 AM to my treo chimming about every 5 minutes. It wasn’t the way I wanted to wake up but we probably all know the feeling at one point or another. So why was my treo talking so much? Well at 12:03 AM a transaction decided to start blocking some updates. At this point SQLdm decided to let me know. By the time I logged in to check the blocked transactions were in limbo for around 5203 seconds.
Today, I decided it was time to try out VisualSVN (I wasn’t committing as much as I needed.) So I downloaded and bought a license at the same time, it’s only 49 dollars and I have to help the economy. I installed version 1.5.4. First, I closed Visual studio 2008, of course (a rare thing these days). After installing VisualSVN, I had to install the new TortoiseSVN 1.5.5. I don’t exactly remember which version I had anymore but it was not enough apparently.
DevExpress have released a collection of free ASP.NET controls that you can use “without royalties or distribution costs”. The applications you create with these controls can be distributed royalty free and all the controls are are fully supported by both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. Some of the ones I think stand out as potentially being very useful are the: TextEdit ProgressBarControl XtraTabControl SplitterControl ASPxCloudControl For a full list, visit http://www.
What Are the RML Utilities? The Microsoft SQL Server support team uses several internally written utilities to ease the work that is related to a typical customer support case. One such utility suite is the Replay Markup Language (RML) Utilities for SQL Server. Database developers and system administrators can use the RML Utilities to work with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
Take a look at this code which I found a while back in a stored proc declare @id int,@xtype char(1),@uid int,@info int,@status int set @id =(select id from sysobjects where name = 'sysobjects') set @xtype =(select xtype from sysobjects where name = 'sysobjects') set @uid =(select uid from sysobjects where name = 'sysobjects') set @info =(select info from sysobjects where name = 'sysobjects') set @status =(select status from sysobjects where name = 'sysobjects') select @id ,@xtype ,@uid ,@info ,@status go Do you see what is wrong?
I like my iGoogle alot (since last week ;-)) it gives me a good rss reader and gtalk for those places where instant messenging is blocked (although this doesn’t seem to work in IE7 only in FF3). But sometimes the Ajax features or is the javascript part causes some problems. In my setup you will see the google reader thing on the left and gtalk on the right. And the red square is the problem area.
The week of November 10th is Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 week on Channel 9! They will have 12 videos going live this week featuring interviews with various members of the Visual Studio and the .NET Framework product teams, including several screencast demonstrations of the latest bits. Stay tuned to http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ for all of the action. Here’s the lineup: Monday, November 10th: – Visual Studio 2010 Overview with Jason Zander
Recently a friend asked the question on the security side of things. Security in SQL Server can be confusing and I’m not going to try to convince you it can’t be. Sure there are about 5 people out there that understand is completely and all aspects of the landscape but the majority need to research things like schemas and roles every other time they need to work on them. The question went something along the lines of this.