Lately, I’ve been finding more and more reasons to look in the transaction log for investigative purposes. Questions come up quite regularly asking how to determine who performed some action such as deleting data, changing logins, or disabling jobs. The first reaction may be that if you aren’t auditing for the specific action, you’re out … Read More →
A little more than a year ago while working at Idera, I was consulted on reports from a few clients using the Idera monitoring tool SQL diagnostic manager (SQLdm). SQLdm was reporting very high numbers for internal object allocations (internal_objects_alloc_page_count) and very low numbers for internal object deallocations (internal_objects_dealloc_page_count) to the point that SQLdm showed … Read More →
Tempdb Contention That Can’t be Soothed By Adding Files I’ve talked a lot in the past about tempdb contention and how to monitor for and identify it in blog posts, a whitepaper, webcasts, and live presentations. Okay, so I tend to get a little preachy about certain things and configuring tempdb to prevent tempdb contention … Read More →
Troubleshooting Database Mirroring Error 1418 Updated Last night I was helping someone with a database mirroring setup problem via email. It has been a long time since I came across a new cause for the infamous 1418 error for database mirroring. This time the error was accompanied by an error in the SQL Log on … Read More →
Whitepaper: Demystify Tempdb Performance & Management There are many misconceptions and myths about tempdb and purported best practices are inconsistent at best. It’s hard to know which advice to follow when one resource says to always do it one way and another tells you to always do it the opposite way. Many times, both resources … Read More →
Why We Follow Best Practices There are many reasons why we follow best practices. My own reasons have changed over the course of my career. Early in my career as a database developer and then later as a new DBA, I followed best practices because people who claimed to know more about SQL Server said … Read More →
Breaking Down TempDB Contention (part 2) I wrote a somewhat popular script and blog post a while back called Breaking Down TempDB Contention. This post explains how to identify tempdb contention. This past Friday, Jonathan Kehayias (blog|@SQLPoolboy) contacted me about the script. Jonathan said that he thought the math was off just a little bit … Read More →
SQL PASS Summit 2011: Session Files This past week was the SQL PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, WA. I presented three sessions (regular session, lightning talk, panel discussion) plus ran a focus group on advanced certification and hosted a Birds of a Feather lunch table on disaster recovery. It was a busy, busy week. Below … Read More →
The Barking Dog Analogy A discussion started today on Twitter about CXPacket waits. There had been a heated debate on the subject on Twitter the previous night (wow, does that sound geeky), so many of us got looped into today’s discussion. Someone had experienced a problem with a delete query on a large table causing … Read More →
T-SQL Tuesday #21 – Bringing Ugly Back This blog entry is participating in T-SQL Tuesday #21, hosted this month by Adam Machanic (Blog|@AdamMachanic). You are invited to visit his blog to join the blog party. You are welcome to write your own participating blog post for the party or just to read more blogs participating … Read More →
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