Availability Group Direct Seeding: Mind Your Backup Jobs
I’ll get right to the point While you’re Direct Seeding, you have to be careful with any other full or differential backup jobs running on the server. This is an artifact of the Direct Seeding process,...
View ArticleLast Day Shenanigans
To follow up on my NY Times Best Selling blog post On First Day Deal Breakers, here’s something you can do on your last day, as a friendly reminder that everyone is losing a valued team member. Change...
View ArticleNew Sample Databases From Microsoft
In celebration of AdventureWorks being out of business for a decade Microsoft has released a couple new databases. Wide World Importers is a fresh-faced start up, probably a drug smuggling front, run...
View ArticleSQL Server 2014 SP2: DBCC CLONEDATABASE
Getting developers production data stinks DBAs are stuck in this annoying cycle where they need to give developers production, or production-like data, but… Production data can be huge. Hundreds of...
View ArticleWhy Not Just Create Statistics?
Here at Brent Ozar Unlimited We have a proud tradition of not blaming index fragmentation for everything. There are points you should deal with it, but they’re probably not 5% and 30% and 1000 pages....
View ArticleWhere Do Missing Index Requests Come From?
Be honest, here You don’t care about most indexing problems. Duplicates, Borderline Duplicates, Unused, Wide, Non-aligned Partitions… All you’re here for are the Missing Indexes. Wham, bam, your query...
View ArticleDell DBA Days Prep: Cardinality Estimator Trace Flags and Links
This comes up during Office Hours once a week Which pretty much gives it a 100% hit rate. I’m writing this mostly to have something to reference when people ask. Trace flags If you restore a database...
View ArticleDell DBA Days Prep: Memory Grants Added to sp_BlitzCache and sp_BlitzFirst
Exciting New Doodads When SP3 for 2012 dropped, we were all super excited by the new query tuning-centric features that were at our disposal. Now all we had to do was get people to install SP3! Great...
View ArticleQuestion From Office Hours: SQL Handle vs. Plan Handle
Great question! We recently added some columns to sp_BlitzCache to help you remove undesirable plans from the cache. Doing this will force SQL to come up with a new plan, or you know, just re-create...
View ArticleDBA Days: Money for Nothing, Chips for Free
Throwing hardware at it We gotta move these E5-2670 v3s These were just sitting around Dell. On a table. Not doing anything. They might have been broken; I’m not sure. But that’s not the point. The...
View ArticleDBA Days: Scripts from Downtime Train
ostress is so much fun It’s totally free to download and use as part of Microsoft’s RML Utilities. What else is in there? Stuff I’ve never used! I hear you can read trace files or something else...
View ArticleDBA Days: Chaos Sloth
I love a bad idea I mean, just look at me. I’m covered in them! So when Brent wanted to randomly make his server act crappy, I wrote a script for it. Usual caveats here. Don’t run this in production....
View ArticleDBA Days: Killing TempDB softly
Don’t make me regret publishing this This really will take a server down immediately. You can restart it, as we learned during DBA Days, but… If you also go ahead and make this an Agent job that runs...
View ArticleDBA Days: Pre-maintenance Window Rituals
Like a DBA batter’s box While we were hanging out in between webcasts at Dell, we got to talking about stuff we used to do before maintenance windows. Things that brought us good luck, warded off blue...
View ArticlePartitioned Views: A How-To Guide
This is not about table partitioning If you want to learn about that, there’s a whole great list of links here, and the Best Blogger Alive has a tremendous post on why table partitioning won’t make...
View ArticleWhat To Do If sp_BlitzFirst Warns About High Compilations
Compiles Aren’t The Same As Recompiles If you’re seeing high RECOMPILES, this post isn’t for you. We’ll talk about the differences between compiles and recompiles, but not how to troubleshoot...
View ArticleDivide By Zero Hero
Alright, so at least they’re not NULLs But zero is actually literally much more problemaaaaatic per se (add lots of annoying vocal fry to this when you read it) when it comes to math. Or maths,...
View ArticleUpdate On Connect Item To Replace DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS
ALL CAPS EXCITEMENT In rather fun news, a Connect Item of mine about replacing DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS with a DMV or function got updated as ‘Resolved as Fixed’. It was only slightly odd, because I...
View ArticleThe Law Of The Minimum
I like science fiction Not enough to go to conventions, or memorize every line, but I have some opinions on things. Dune is probably my favorite series of stories in the genre. Yes, I think Paul would...
View ArticleSet Statistics… Profile?
Forgotten, But Not Gone Two of the best built-in tools to figure out if your query tuning efforts are headed in the right direction are SET STATISTICS TIME ON and SET STATISTICS IO ON. If you’re really...
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