While closely monitoring a query that I was running, I observed some strange behaviour by another query. This other query quickly beat mine in terms of Pages read, which is fine, no competition. It went on to exceed it 4 x. The thing that stuck out was the “Degree of Parallelism” that it used –…
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’ve recently been getting more familiar with Power BI, thanks to an excellent on-site training course delivered by Stuart and Alison from Burning Suit training. It was great to be supported by my employer with some on-site training, especially in a product that holds so much potential. Power BI has been of interest to me…
How can a Table increase in size when you reduce the size of a column? This came up again a few days ago as one of my Developer friends took heed of my comments about using “appropriate Data Types” for Data Storage. They worked out that using BIGINT to store a Client number was probably…
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…
This Checklist came about after installing additional SQL Server Instances on existing Servers and finding that a bit of additional work was required before Users could access. It’s equally valid for default installations of SQL Server. Allow remote connections to this server This is the suggestion that most “helpful” users provide when they report that…
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about how Cloud services will rapidly replace “On Premises” SQL Server. Snowflake, one of the major players in the Data Warehouse space offers just this, with the promise of “no requirement for a DBA”. Surely a tempting proposal, but should this be a concern for us?…
I received a request for help today from a friend (let’s call him “Dave”). Dave was looking for a better way to deploy projects across a large number of Databases spread over multiple Servers. My initial response suggested looking at scripting – either using SQLCMD or Powershell. Alternatively, there are tools such as Redgate’s “MultiScript”…
A few thoughts on SQL Server Configuration Manager. As a DBA, I use it lot. Knowing a little more about it can be handy for others too. If you want to know what SQL Instances are installed on a Server, their Startup parameters and whether they are running at the moment, you can open SQL…
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.…
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