By Lori Brown | SQL Development , SQL Server
Here are a few new string functions that I cam across while doing some research. Just goes to show you that you learn something new every day! STRING_AGG (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/string-agg-transact-sql) This function is available starting with SQL 2017. It concatenates values from rows and places your separator in between the values. Here I create a comma […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Backup and Restore , Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server
Recently I had a client who contacted me because all of the sudden the backup for a couple of databases started to fail. While those backups had been running successfully in the past they suddenly started failing with this message: With a little more digging he found more info. Here is more verbiage from the […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server , SQL Toolkit
We recently were troubleshooting an issue where one client reported that the SQL instance was suddenly very slow. One of the things we do is check to see what queries are currently running in SQL by using the following query: — Finds info on queries that are running NOW SELECT GETDATE() AS CurrentTime, SUBSTRING(text, CASE […]
Continue readingBy Ginger Daniel | Backup and Restore , Database Mail , SQL Administration , SQL Server
According to best practices for a SQL environment, you should never place your test or development databases on a production server. However sometimes best practices are ignored, sometimes the DBA’s advice is disregarded (ahem…), or sometimes an organization simply does not have the financial resources to spin up separate servers for testing or development. Whatever […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | Advice , Beginner , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server
I am recycling this blog post from 2015….”Why?”, you might ask…..Well, I am still running into instances with this exact issue. Soooo, here we go….again. Enjoy. I recently received a panicked call from a client who had a SQL instance go down because the server’s C drive was full. As the guy looked he found […]
Continue readingBy Lori Brown | ColumnStore , Miscellaneous , SQL Administration , SQL Server
I was recently looking at a way to easily identify if any objects in a database were In-Memory. Since many times I am tasked with taking on systems that I have never seen before, I have learned that it is important to have ways of checking to see if some of the more specialized features […]
Continue readingBy Ginger Daniel | SQL Administration , SQL Server , Trace Flags
Tempdb database is a system database that is shared across all databases and all connections in SQL Server. As a general rule, I configure all my client’s servers to have multiple tempdb files with consistent sizes and consistent auto growth set according to best practices. The number of tempdb files created equals the number of […]
Continue readingBy Ginger Daniel | SQL Administration , SQL Server
While doing some work on a test environment recently I realized the AlwaysOn Group was failing. (On a production system I would have had several Alerts set to notify me of any issues). The dashboard on my test instance showed that the secondary replica was not synchronizing and from clicking on the blue warning links […]
Continue readingBy Jeffry Schwartz | Missing Indexes , Performance Tuning , Query Tuning , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server
Review Due to the holiday week, this part will be shorter than usual. In Parts 1 through 7 of this blog series the author discussed various aspects of SQL Server indices such as: Types of indices and their variations, e.g., clustered, nonclustered, filtered, and covering Physical versus logical index access methods, e.g., seeks, scans, key/RID lookups, […]
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