Sometimes, queries just go bad. They can take you on a Journey. Not always a Journey that you want to go on, but so long as you’re learning then “The Journey is the reward”. I’ve seen a lot of queries recently that use the EXCEPT operator. Frequently used in Data Warehouses to process Slowly Changing…
How many times do you ask someone to do something and get the response “I’m not doing that – there’s no point”. Turns out SQL Server does that sometimes too – as I was reminded recently. After spending time examining query plans using SentryOne Plan Explorer, I was faced with the following improbable Plan…
An issue was reported with one of my SQL Servers that required it to be rebooted. After the reboot, I logged on to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to check the SQL ErrorLog to ensure that all was well. Unfortunately, I was met with an error when I tried to open the ErrorLog: “Failed to…
Patching a large SQL Server estate can be a big job. Where possible, tools such as Ivanti HEAT can be used to deliver and install patches, but this doesn’t always work. Some patching needs to be done manually – e.g. where applications or users need to be managed or when dealing with High Availability situations…
Recently, I had a situation where a lot of data needed to be deleted. This was caused by a Monitoring system which was incorrectly configured. When Monitoring, you should Monitor just the information that you need, but no more. In this case, far too much information was being monitored and recorded, causing the Database that…
I was troubleshooting an issue in Dev with SQL Server Reporting Services. As part of the work, I decided to patch the environment to see if that might help. Patches often resolve issues, and give you a few new issues too – let’s call it “the bug exchange”. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a…
I recently encountered some strange behaviour with SQLAgent Jobs in an Always On Availability Group. There’s a major difference between SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and SQL Server Availability Groups that makes it a little bit more complicated with SQLAgent Jobs. Put simply, with a Failover Cluster, there is only one “SQL Server” involved.…
I had a SQL Server that needed to be uninstalled. It hadn’t been used for some time. It had been Disabled, but not removed. The first thing I had to do was to check when the SQL Instance was last used. In most cases, you can find this out by checking the DateTime of the…
Over time, things come along that you think “that would have been so useful” in the past. Data Compression is one of those features within SQL Server. Data Compression has been around for a few years. It was introduced in SQL Server 2008. I remember a conversation with Tony Rogerson (UK SQL Server User…
I have previously spoken about the issues caused by Shrinking Data Files in SQL Server, but also some genuine reasons why you might need to do this, and how. Shrinking Log files is a different matter. Log files can grow enormously for a few reasons, quite often by accident. A common pattern occurs when someone…
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