By Lori Brown | Backup and Restore , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server
I found out that I have been missing something from our regular database backups that I had no idea that I should have been using all along. I know about verifying your backup file and have incorporated into our standard maintenance routines one that will periodically test backups by restoring using VERIFYONLY. However, I totally […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server
I have been working on some improvements to some of the regular ways we monitor for important changes. We always have to be on the lookout for unexpected changes being made in the SQL instances that we monitor since often times we are not the only team who has sysadmin access to the instance. We […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Jobs , SQL Administration , SQL Server
Hooray!! We finally have our 70-764 and 70-765 certification exams done and can turn our attention back to blogging more regularly. Those exams were pretty tough mostly because there was a lot of information that had to be memorized since there are always aspects of SQL that we don’t regularly use and there is no […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Miscellaneous , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server
This might be kind of basic but since I am working on a comprehensive script to discover things that a DBA really needs to know about, I made a couple of queries that will produce a list of the databases that have multiple files along with the locations of the physical files. One query finds […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Installation , SQL Administration , SQL Server , Upgrade
I was recently performing an in-place upgrade of SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2014 on one of my client’s servers. I have done a ton of successful and uneventful in-place upgrades and was surprised when the upgrade failed with the error message: “Failed to create a new folder ‘X:\SQLBackups’. The specified path is invalid (for […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Dependencies , Object Information , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server
A little while back I wrote a post going over sp_help in a beginning effort to find table dependency information. https://www.sqlrx.com/using-sp_help-to-find-object-dependencies/. That expanded to reviewing sys.dm_sql_referenced_entities & sys.dm_sql_referenced_entities (https://www.sqlrx.com/finding_things_sql_that_reference_a_table/ & https://www.sqlrx.com/how-to-find-the-objects-and-columns-a-stored-procedure-or-view-uses/ ) and sys.sql_expression_dependencies (https://www.sqlrx.com/using-sys-sql_expression_dependencies-as-a-single-source-to-find-referenced-and-referencing-objects/ ) Now I want to loop back just a bit and expand on more information that is found in sp_help […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Dependencies , Object Information , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server
I thought I would continue to expand on ways to view dependencies. This post will give you an alternate way to find things referencing tables and finding things that are referenced by a stored procedure or view after my previous posts on the subject. See these (https://www.sqlrx.com/finding_things_sql_that_reference_a_table/ & https://www.sqlrx.com/how-to-find-the-objects-and-columns-a-stored-procedure-or-view-uses/ ) A different way to find […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Backup and Restore , Helpful Scripts , Log Shipping , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server
I have a client that uses a lot of disconnected log shipping on a few servers. They do this because they want to have a copy of their database that is actually hosted by software vendors for reporting purposes. So, disconnected log shipping it is! We pull down files that have been FTP’d to the […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Performance Tuning , SQL Administration , SQL Server
I occasionally come across some pretty good sized databases that are set up with a single data file. We recently have been working with a client to break up their single data file into multiple data files so that we can spread them over several different LUNs and so that they can take advantage of […]
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