Category Archives for "SQL Administration"

Rx for Demystifying Index Tuning Decisions – Part 1

By Jeffry Schwartz | Expert , Missing Indexes , Performance Tuning , Query Tuning , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server

Overview Indices are one of the most troubling and mysterious areas for DBAs and developers. Most understand that adding a badly needed index can yield dramatic query performance improvements, but how does one know what is needed? Many believe more indices are better, regardless of the number. Most fear deleting ANY existing indices, even when […]

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Log Connections to SQL Instance

By Ginger Daniel | Helpful Scripts , Miscellaneous , SQL Administration , SQL Server

If you ever have a need to monitor connections to your SQL server, and any related information about the connections such as database, logins, etc., there are some DMVs that can give you tons of information. Previously you might have used the sys.sysprocesses table to derive much of this information, but this is being deprecated […]

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Get Index Column Info with Includes for One or Many Tables

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Missing Indexes , Performance Tuning , Query Tuning , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server

I was recently working with one of my clients on some low hanging fruit type of query tuning. We had checked the cache for plans with missing index warnings in them and were trying to see if we could tweak and existing index or add a new index to speed things up. If you ever […]

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Find Out Who Changed the Database Recovery Model

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server

I ran into a situation where we were working on a migration and had been directed to put all databases into FULL recovery model in anticipation of using log shipping to push databases to the new server. Once we are ready to go live on the new server the plan was to ship the last […]

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Log Shipping Backup Failure

By Ginger Daniel | Backup and Restore , Log Shipping , SQL Administration , SQL Server

For years the SQL Agent service account on my client’s SQL Server instance ran the Maintenance Plans and SQL Agent jobs with no issues. Many of the SQL databases were set to Full recovery model, and Tlog backups executed on regular bases with no problems. The client decided to migrate to new hardware in a […]

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List Tables That Contain Special Indexes

By SQLRx Admin | ColumnStore , SQL Administration , SQL Server , Tip of the Month

Find out if any of your tables contain special columnstore or spatial indexes. Columnstore indexes organizes the data in columns instead of rows like traditional indexes and can increase performance on large data sets as found in data warehouses. Spatial indexes are a special type of index on a spatial column such as geometry or […]

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AlwaysOn – Endpoint Ownership

By Ginger Daniel | SQL Administration , SQL Server

It is not uncommon for a DBA or other IT staff to set up AlwaysOn in a SQL environment and later leave the company. We ran into this recently with a client and were asked to delete the previous employee’s login from everything SQL related. We were able to remove the login from all databases […]

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Use MSDB to Get Database Backup Size and Total Time For Each

By Lori Brown | Backup and Restore , Beginner , Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server

We recently started using a third party software to do our in-house SQL backups so that the backup files are stored in a redundant and safe place. To confirm that the software was indeed compressing backups as it stated it would, we wanted to see what each backup size actually was in SQL so that […]

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AlwaysOn 2016 – Encrypted Databases and Performance

By Ginger Daniel | Encryption , SQL Administration , SQL Server

It is common knowledge that encrypting a database causes degraded performance in a SQL server. In an AlwaysOn environment performance can be even more sluggish because there is the extra element of data replication latency. How much difference does it really make? Of course the answer is “it depends” on your environment and your workload. […]

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