Posts

You all know that checking our databases for corruption regularly is a must. But what about tempdb? Do you need to check it as well? The maintenance plans that come with SQL Server do not run DBCC CHECKDB on tempdb, which is a strong indicator that it’s a special database and something different is happening behind the scenes. If you think that relying on the behavior of a poor tool such as maintenance plans to make assumptions on internals is a bit far-fetched, well, I see your point. [Read More]

Next week, on Saturday 28, make sure you don’t miss SQLSaturday Pordenone! Pordenone is the place where the Italian adventure with SQLSaturday started, more than two years ago. It was the beginning of a journey that brought many SQLSaturdays to Italy, with our most successful one in Parma last November. Now we’re back in Pordenone to top that result! We have a fantastic schedule for this event, with a great speaker lineup and great topics for the sessions. [Read More]

We’re being told over and over that “throwing hardware at the problem” is not the correct solution for performance problems and a 2x faster server will not make our application twice as fast. Quite true, but there’s one thing that we can do very easily without emptying the piggy bank and won’t hurt for sure: buying more RAM. The price for server-class RAM has dropped so dramatically that today you can buy a 16 GB module for around € 200. [Read More]

Some weeks ago I blogged about the discouraging signals coming from Connect and my post started a discussion that didn’t go very far. Instead it died quite soon: somebody commented the post and ranted about his Connect experience. I’m blogging again about Connect, but I don’t want to start a personal war against Microsoft: today I want to look at what happened from a new perspective. What I find disappointing is a different aspect of the reactions from the SQL Server community, which made me think that maybe it’s not only Connect’s fault. [Read More]

As you probably know, SQL Server allows only one default instance per server. The reason is not actually something special to SQL Server, but it has to do with the way TCP/IP endpoints work. In fact, a SQL Server default instance is nothing special compared to a named instance: it has a specific instance id (MSSQLSERVER) and listens on a well-known TCP port (1433), but it has no other intrinsic property or feature that makes it different from any other instance. [Read More]

A couple of years ago I blogged about a bug on the Data Collector that I couldn’t resolve but with an ugly workaround. At the end of that post, I stated that I wouldn’t have bothered filing the bug on Connect, due to prior discouraging results. Well, despite what I wrote there, I took the time to open a bug on Connect (the item can be found here), which was promptly closed as “won’t fix”. [Read More]

Today when I checked my mailbox I found an amazing surprise: I joined the ranks of the Most Valuable Professionals for SQL Server! I am honoured to join a community of people that I highly respect and have always been my inspiration. The MVPs I had the pleasure to meet are a model to strive for: exceptional technical experts and great community leaders that devote their own time to spread their knowledge. [Read More]

Monitoring blocking and deadlocking hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes, the tools available in SQL Server are not as friendly as we would like them to be. Some are very useful for alerting, but don’t provide a simple way to capture additional information about the event. For instance, a simple SQLAgent alert for “deadlocks/sec > 0” is enough to shoot an email to the DBAs whenever a deadlock happens, but it doesn’t provide a simple way to capture the deadlock graph and include it in the email or save it to a destination table. [Read More]

Does anybody need another good reason to avoid setting AUTO_CLOSE on a database? Looks like I found one. Some days ago, all of a sudden, a database started to throw errors along the lines of “The log for database MyDatabase is not available”. The instance was an old 2008 R2 Express (don’t get me started on why an Express Edition is in production…) with some small databases. The log was definitely there and the database looked online. [Read More]

Some weeks ago I had to wipe my machine and reinstall everything from scratch, SQL Server included. For some reason that I still don’t understand, SQL Server Management Studio installed fine, but I couldn’t install Books Online from the online help repository. Unfortunately, installing from offline is not an option with SQL Server 2014, because the installation media doesn’t include the Language Reference documentation. The issue is well known: Aaron Bertrand blogged about it back in april when SQL Server 2014 came out and he updated his post in august when the documentation was finally completely published. [Read More]