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• T-SQL Tuesday #31: Paradox of the Sawtooth Log

  - by merrillaldrich

  Today’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Aaron Nelson ( @sqlvariant | sqlvariant.com ) has the theme Logging . I was a little pressed for time today to pull this post together, so this will be short and sweet. For a long time, I wondered why and how a database in Full Recovery Mode, which you’d expect to have an ever-growing log -- as all changes are written to the log file -- could in fact have a log usage pattern that looks like this: This graph shows the Percent Log Used (bold, red) and the Log File(s)...(read more)

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• Sudoku Solver

  - by merrillaldrich

  Today I am putting up something silly, just for fun. I set myself the task a while back to write a Sudoku solver in T-SQL, but with two dumb constraints that I would never follow given a real problem: I didn’t look at any documented techniques for solving Sudoku, and I specifically avoided T-SQL solutions, even though this has been done already many times. (The first thing I do with a real problem is to see who solved it already, and how, since most things have been done already. Not checking is...(read more)

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• Psyched for SQL Saturday #43

  - by merrillaldrich

  Hope to see YOU at SQL Saturday in Redmond, WA. If not, well, bummer. I'm pumped! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• 2010: It’s a Wrap

  - by merrillaldrich

  So, last day of the year, and I can see many people are in a reflective mood. I don’t usually deep dive into goals or resolutions, but I’m not immune either :-). But I’ll try to keep this short and to-the-point. First a big shout out to Adam for letting me have a presence here on sqlblog.com. I am humbled by the other SQL experts we have on this site, and I am certainly one of the least qualified, but I hope my small contributions are useful. Also thanks, Adam, for all the other community support...(read more)

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• Striving to be boring - or at least have boring systems

  - by merrillaldrich

  A developer I work with, whom I respect a great deal, reminded me of this truism today. I'm not sure who came up with the original, but they deserve credit wherever they are: “A good system administrator is a bored system administrator.” As a DBA, this really rings true for me. Being a DBA should not be a thrilling job. Within reason, there should not be myriad surprises, nor a roller coaster ride, wondering what will break each day. There should not be numerous 2 AM calls or frantic fixes. If there...(read more)

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• Poor Man’s PowerShell TFS SSMS Integration

  - by merrillaldrich

  This is lame. Still, here goes: I need, increasingly, to author both PowerShell and SQL Server scripts, bundle them into a solution and store that in TFS. Usually the PowerShell scripts are very closely related to SQL Server, and have a lot of SQL in them. I am hopeful that 2012 SSDT, or the tighter integration of SSMS and Visual Studio in 2012, might help put all of this in one place, but for now I am stuck in SSMS 2008 R2. So here are my blunt attempts to marry these activities. (This post is rather...(read more)

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• SQL File Layout Viewer 1.2

  - by merrillaldrich

  Just ahead of presenting it at SQL Saturday in my home town of Minneapolis / Saint Paul, I’m happy to release an updated version of the SQL Server File Layout Viewer. This is a utility I released back in March for inspecting the arrangement of data pages in SQL Server files. If you will be in Minneapolis this Saturday (space permitting), please come out and see this tool in action! New Features Based on feedback from others in the SQL Server community, I made these enhancements: Page types now provide...(read more)

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• Worst code I've written in a while

  - by merrillaldrich

  Here's a nice, compact bit of WTF-ery I had to write for a prod issue today: Again: UPDATE TOP ( 1 ) dbo . someTable SET field3 = 'NEW' WHERE field2 = 'NEW' AND field3 = '' IF @@ROWCOUNT > 0 GOTO Again Can you guess from the code what awesomesauce issues I was working around? This was a reminder for me that sometimes there is time to do it right, but sometimes you just have to do it now. I need that lesson sometimes, as I tend to be a perfectionist. If you are trying to do it right , please don't...(read more)

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• SCOM, 90 days in, III. Stuff to Add

  - by merrillaldrich

  This is the third installment of a series on our deployment of System Center at my workplace, emphasis on SQL Server MP. At this point we’ve got Operations Manager installed, and up and running, and we’ve been able to categorize all the monitored servers into production, preproduction, test and DR using groups that have dynamic membership rules. We’ve got the SQL management pack working with out-of-the-box settings, and used it to locate all the SQL Server stack services like the engine, reporting...(read more)

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• T-SQL Tuesday 24: Ode to Composable Code

  - by merrillaldrich

  I love the T-SQL Tuesday tradition, started by Adam Machanic and hosted this month by Brad Shulz . I am a little pressed for time this month, so today’s post is a short ode to how I love saving time with Composable Code in SQL. Composability is one of the very best features of SQL, but sometimes gets picked on due to both real and imaginary performance worries. I like to pick composable solutions when I can, while keeping the perf issues in mind, because they are just so handy and eliminate so much...(read more)

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• Dear ISV: You’re Keeping Me Awake Nights with Your VARCHAR() Dates

  - by merrillaldrich

  I generally sleep well and deeply. My wife and I once went to sleep, back when we lived in the Heights neighborhood in Houston, and when we woke up the next day, the house across the street had been removed . We never heard a thing. However, tonight it’s 3 AM here in Seattle and I am wide awake writing to you about data types. Why? Because a software vendor is making me crazy with their database schema. This is sad and wrong on many levels, but there it is. It’s harder, I think, to be held responsible...(read more)

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• Server Migration Checklist II

  - by merrillaldrich

  Easy Breezy Login Audit for your Ol’ 2000 Server In the last post on this topic I put up the preparatory steps I’ve been using for server migrations. Here I am posting some code that has worked well for us to trace who/what is connecting to our older SQL Server 2000 machines. It’s a simple audit of login events, tracing the login name, host name, database, and last login time for connections to the server, and gave us valuable insight into who was really using the machines and which databases might...(read more)

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• October Update to Rules-Driven Maintenance

  - by merrillaldrich

  Happy Fall! It’s a beautiful October here in Minneapolis / Saint Paul. In preparation for my home town SQL Saturday this weekend, as well as the PASS Summit, I offer an update to the Rules-Driven Maintenance code I originally published back in August 2012 . It’s hard to believe this thing is now more than two years old – it’s been an incredible help as the number of databases and instance my team manages has grown. One enhancement with this update is the ability to set overrides for both Index and...(read more)

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• SCOM, 90 Days In, II. Noise.

  - by merrillaldrich

  Once you get past the basic architecture of a SCOM implementation, and build the servers, and so on, the first real problem is … well, noise. Suddenly (depending on how you deploy) the system will reach out, like marching army ants or a some very clever cybernetic spider and find, and then proceed to yell at you about, every single problem on every server you didn’t know you had. That, of course, is the point. Still, a tool like this is not useful if it doesn’t surface the real problems from the...(read more)

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• Outstanding SQL Saturday

  - by merrillaldrich

  I had the privilege to attend the SQL Saturday held in Redmond today, and it was really outstanding. Among the many sessions, I especially enjoyed and took a lot of useful information away from Greg Larsen’s Dynamic Management Views session, Kalen Delaney’s Compression Session – I am planning to implement 2008 Enterprise compression on my company’s data warehouse later this year – and Remus Rusanu’s session on Service Broker to process NAP data. I want to send out heartfelt thanks to the generous...(read more)

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• Outstanding SQL Saturday

  - by merrillaldrich

  I had the privilege to attend the SQL Saturday held in Redmond today, and it was really outstanding. Among the many sessions, I especially enjoyed and took a lot of useful information away from Greg Larsen’s Dynamic Management Views session, Kalen Delaney’s Compression Session – I am planning to implement 2008 Enterprise compression on my company’s data warehouse later this year – Remus Rusanu’s session on Service Broker to process NAP data, and Matt Masson’s presentation on high performance SSIS...(read more)

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• Operations Manager SQL monitoring issue?

  - by merrillaldrich

  We're in the early stages of implementing System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, and from what I've see so far it looks really good. I am still interested to see the depth of performance counter information that it'll collect and store, but haven't been able to really dig into that just yet. There is one issue I am seeing and I don't know if others have come across this (could not find much online about it either): computing a database file free space alert rule is a little complicated, and it...(read more)

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• Windows Server 2003 network boogey men every DBA should know

  - by merrillaldrich

  Recently I was again visited by my old friends TCP Chimney and SynAttackProtect . (Yeah, sometimes I feel like I mostly blog about 5-year old problems, but many of us as DBA's have to work on older versions or older systems, and so repeat older problems :-). This has been written about before, but as I BinGoogled around I noticed you are more likely to find the documents if you search for the cause, and not the symptoms. Most people who face a problem, of course, know the symptoms but not the cause....(read more)

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• SQLSat65, Great Perf Counters Poster from Quest

  - by merrillaldrich

  I was fortunate to be able to attend the Vancouver BC SQLSaturday this past weekend, and it was excellent! Great sessions, good facility, well attended. Nice work, and a huge thank you to the volunteers that made that happen. One side perk: I got a copy of this terrific performance counters poster from Quest, which you can download as a PDF for free. Very handy, especially as a teaching tool. I'm using it for my SCOM MP work. Check it out....(read more)

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• Enjoy Portland SQL Saturday without me

  - by merrillaldrich

  I was incredibly psyched to go to SQL Saturday #27 in Portland, but alas Sunday is my older son Will's birthday, and I can't manage both events in the same weekend. Chalk it up to work-life balance. Anyway, if you are going, have a great time! And maybe I'll see you in Redmond on June 12. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Microsoft Delivers Full Suite of SQL Server Powershell Cmdlets

  - by merrillaldrich

  We’ve all been waiting several years for this, and finally it’s here! Coinciding (approximately) with the release of SQL Server 2012, a new Feature Pack has appeared on the Microsoft web site that adds a full suite of PowerShell cmdlets for DDL and other functions. This means that, at last, we can do things like fully-featured SQL deployment scripts without all the (severe) limitations of T-SQL, such as primitive use of variables, flow control, exception handling. Taking a cue, finally, from the...(read more)

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• Other SCOM users at SQLSaturday #65 Vancouver?

  - by merrillaldrich

  After a little hair-graying fun around passport renewal and family logistics, it looks like I'll be at the Vancouver SQLSaturday ! I am pumped. (I was entirely convinced they would call it "SQLSaturd' eh?" and I'm frankly a little disappointed about the name... :-) I'm on the tail end of a three-month deployment of System Center Operations Manager with the SQL management pack - if you are a DBA and SCOM user, too, I'd love to meet you and talk shop at the SQLSaturday event. Please drop me a line...(read more)

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• Visualize Disaster

  - by merrillaldrich

  Or, How Mirroring Off-Site Saved my #Bacon My company does most things right. Our management is very supportive, listens and generally funds the technology that makes sense for the best interest of the organization. We have good redundancy, HA and disaster recovery in place that fit our objectives. Still, as they say, bad things can happen to good people. This weekend we did have an outage despite our best efforts, and that’s the reason for this post. It went pretty well for my team, all things considered,...(read more)

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• Existing Instance, Shiny New Disks

  - by merrillaldrich

  Migrating an Instance of SQL Server to New Disks I get to do something pretty entertaining this week – migrate SQL instances on a 2008 cluster from one disk array to another! Zut alors! I am so excited I can hardly contain myself, so let’s get started. (Only a DBA could love this stuff, am I right? I know.) Anyway, here’s one method of many to migrate your data. Assumption : this is a host-based migration, which just means I’m using the Windows file system to push the data from one set of SAN disks...(read more)

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• Psyched for SQL Saturday #43

  - by merrillaldrich

  Hope to see YOU at SQL Saturday in Redmond, WA. If not, well, bummer. I'm pumped! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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