Category Archives for "SQL Administration"

AlwaysOn 2016 – Encrypted Databases in an AG

By Ginger Daniel | Encryption , SQL 2016 , SQL Administration , SQL Server

In the AlwaysOn 2016 release, there are several enhancements that have improved manageability, scalability, and availability. One of the enhancements is the ability to add encrypted databases to an AlwaysOn group. Encrypted databases were allowed in earlier versions of AlwaysOn, however they could not be accessed if there was a failover to a secondary replica […]

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AlwaysOn 2016 – Direct Seeding

By Ginger Daniel | SQL 2016 , SQL Administration , SQL Server

–By Ginger Keys SQL Server 2016 provides some awesome new enhancements and features, especially in Enterprise Edition.  One of the new features relating to AlwaysOn is Direct Seeding. Good stuff – No more time consuming backup and restore Direct Seeding allows you to initialize the databases to your secondary replica(s) without having to configure a […]

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List Partitioned Tables And Other Info About Them

By Lori Brown | Beginner , Helpful Scripts , Partitions , SQL Administration , SQL Server , Tip of the Month

Here is a good way to find out if any of your tables are partitioned in your database using the query below. It is important to know so that you can find out how the tables are partitioned. — Partitioned Tables SELECT DISTINCT t.name AS ParitionedTables FROM sys.partitions p INNER JOIN sys.tables t ON p.object_id […]

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Common Criteria Compliance and LCK_M_SCH_M

By Lori Brown | Expert , Performance Tuning , Security , SQL Administration , SQL Server

If you have ever wondered what happens when you mistakenly enable Common Criteria compliance in SQL, well wonder no more!! We have a client who has no idea how or when Common Criteria was enabled on their production system. All they know is that performance has been slowly degrading. After collecting performance data, we found […]

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SQL 2016 Automatic Seeding of Availability Groups

By Lori Brown | Expert , SQL 2016 , SQL Administration , SQL Server , Trace Flags

I came across something today that I did not know existed in AG’s, Automatic Seeding. This allows SQL to automatically create the secondary replicas for all databases in an AG. Pretty cool!! So if you set things up correctly when you set up your AG’s, you don’t have to worry about backing up databases and […]

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List Tables That May Be Over Indexed

By Lori Brown | Beginner , Helpful Scripts , Performance Tuning , SQL Administration , SQL Server , Tip of the Month

While not having enough indexes can be bad for query performance, having too many indexes can also be just as bad. Use the query below to get a list of tables in your database that has more than 10 indexes. — Tables with large number of indexes select t.name as TablesWithLargeNumInx, count(i.name) as CountIndexes from […]

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SQL Toolkit – Get List of Database Options and Features

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

–By Lori Brown I am going to start up a thread with some queries that I consider to be important to DBA’s. As a consultant, many times we have to start managing SQL instances without any knowledge of why it has been configured in various ways. We usually try to work with our clients to […]

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Is This Database Being Used?

By Ginger Daniel | Beginner , Miscellaneous , SQL Administration , SQL Server

— By Ginger Keys During the migration of a client’s SQL environment to a new hosting provider it was questioned whether all of the databases needed to be migrated. Nobody seemed to know whether several of the databases were used or what they were for. One person suggested we just not move them, and see […]

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Query Tuning – Adding Included Columns To An Existing Index

By Lori Brown | Intermediate , Performance Tuning , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server

— by Lori Brown @SQLSupahStah For the most part, I stick to my daily DBA duties of making sure that SQL Server maintenance is running and that the proverbial lights are on in all my SQL boxes. However, sometimes it is fun to do some tuning and it’s even better when you have a success. I […]

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