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Advent of Code
If you want your skills to be sharp, you practice. If you want to get yourself to actually do practice, you call it a “challenge”. This is what the Advent of Code is. Now let me be perfectly clear...
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Advent of Code – Day 3
Continuing with the language-independent code challenge on Advent of Code – Day 3, I’m tasked with figuring out how well a drunken elf can guide Santa to houses. Since his instructions had Santa...
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Advent of Code – Day 4
Day 4 of the Advent of Code has us mining for data in MD5 hashes, which is out of the comfort zone for a SQL DBA to say the least. Some would say it’s a poor use for SQL Server, and I’d have to agree....
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Thank You for More Than You Realize
Blogging and presenting have changed me for the better, and in ways I didn’t see coming. However, I know I wouldn’t have had them if it wasn’t for three things. Getting it all started, having help...
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Query the Buffer Pool
DBAs are known for asking for more memory, but often can’t say what’s in memory. While I agree that many database servers can use more memory, I’m a firm believer in knowing how you’re using your...
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TempDB memory leak?
I found a bug where I’m seeing TempDB use more memory than it should on multiple versions of SQL Server, especially on servers set up with common best practices. There’s a workaround that has a...
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SQL Saturday Cleveland #SQLSat473
On February 6, 2016, Cleveland is hosting a free training event for SQL Server. This has a lot of the great stuff from the big, paid events, and skips some of the negatives. There’s a great team from...
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Shrinking Database Data Files
Normal DBAs will sum up shrinking a database data file in one word: NO! I’ll talk to you about this subject because I’m not normal. Still, my goal is that you’ll go from “why can’t I shrink my files”...
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Querying Deadlocks From System_Health XEvent
It’s easy to query XEvents to see some of the basic info in deadlocks, including the system_health session which is already capturing this information by default. This script will, by default, read...
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Tim Ford’s Entry-Level Content Challenge
All bloggers started as beginners. We picked things up, learned them, and got to the point where we wanted to start sharing our knowledge. The problem is that most of us moved on to talking about...
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TempDB Excessive Memory Usage Example
I see TempDB using more memory than I feel it should and found a way to resolve it. Previously I dove into technical details and questioning what I saw in my post TempDB Memory Leak? which is great...
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Database Log VLFs
Virtual Log Files (VLFs) split a physical database log file into smaller segments, which are required for how log files work in the background. These are created automatically, but automatically...
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Shrinking Database Log Files
Files in SQL Server need to grow as the database grows, and in very specific circumstances need to be shrunk as well with additional maintenance. There is quite a bit different between log files and...
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Wait Stats Baseline Comparison – Idera Diagnostic Manager
Database servers have to wait on different resources, and these waits are huge to the performance of SQL Server. Sometimes something changes without our knowledge and is running differently than...
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I/O Baseline Comparison – Idera Diagnostic Manager
What servers need the most attention when it comes to I/O? When I increase the memory on a server what effect does it have on I/O? What was it before the change and what was it afterwards? These are...
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Recompile Monitoring using XEvents
Recompiles can be a hidden bottleneck on your server, and it may not be too obvious. I should know, it happened to me. Unfortunately for me, that was before I was a proponent of tracing or using...
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Multiserver Queries
You can run queries against multiple servers at once, and it’s quite useful for a number of reasons. I use it to check settings, verify backups and DBCC ran recently on unmonitored servers, make sure...
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Database Growth Trends – Idera Diagnostic Manager
How fast are your databases growing? Should I panic about a 1 TB database that has 100 GB free on disk? Am I safe with a 100 GB database that also has 100 GB free? Based on those sizes…I have no...
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File Growths
I hinted at file growths in my previous posts about shrinking data and log files. Then I talked about growing log files in my post Database Log VLFs. However, there are still some unanswered...
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Powershell, when were my servers rebooted?
One of my servers wasn’t rebooted when it should have been and I never realized it until after the outage was over. The big deal wasn’t that it didn’t reboot, it was that I never realized it. These...
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