CHECKDB

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]

If you are one among the many that downloaded my consistency check stored procedure called “dba_RunCHECKDB”, you may have noticed a “small” glitch… it doesn’t work on SQL Server 2012! This is due to the resultset definition of DBCC CHECKDB, which has changed again in SQL Server 2012. Trying to pipe the results of that command in the table definition for SQL Server 2008 produces a column mismatch and it obviously fails. [Read More]

Back in 2011 I showed a method to discover the resultset definition of DBCC undocumented commands. At the time, SQL Server 2012 had not been released yet and nothing suggested that the linked server trick could stop working on the new major version. Surprisingly enough it did. If you try to run the same code showed in that old post on a 2012 instance, you will get a quite explicit error message: [Read More]

Some months ago I posted a script on a SQLServerCentral forum to help a member automating the execution of DBCC CHECKDB and send and e-mail alert in case a consistency error is found. The original thread can be found here. I noticed that many people are actually using that script and I also got some useful feedback on the code itself, so I decided to write this post to make an enhanced version available to everyone. [Read More]