Active sessions and block duration
As a DBA, we all need the ability to take a quick glance at the currently active processes on our servers. A lot of times we do this during a problem such as transaction blocking. The first tool that normally…
How to log errors with T-SQL try/catch
Today a co-worker of mine (Brad) asked a question regarding the usage of T-SQL’s Try-Catch block. Brad wanted to write to a table every time a stored procedure failed so that it was easy to recover the error messages and…
SQL Server Index Column Order
At times I am in a position to advise development teams on their practices. What I have learned from this experience is that there is always a demand for me to reduce what I tell them to developer terms. Before the developers…
PowerShell Profile Tips
Automation is one of the purposes for using PowerShell. Automation is a funny thing, however. You can perform steps of automation almost to infinity. If you write a function that replaces 200 lines of code with 1 function call, that’s…
Failing over AlwaysOn Availability Groups
Merry Christmas Eve! A few weeks ago I posted on Availability Group fail-over tests with PowerShell. That post covered the basics of how to check the Availability Group’s state and perform the commands for conducting a zero data loss fail…
My Epic Life Quest – Level 2 Achieved
DING – LEVEL 2 !!! I am excited to announce that I have achieved level 2 in My Epic Life Quest. My epic life quest is an idea that I got from Steve Kamb via Brent Ozar. As life goals…
Start and Save Hyper-V VMs with PowerShell
I use Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 R2 on most of my local workstations between home and work. In order to conserve memory, I turn my Hypver-V lab environments on and off as I need them. Given that my…
Availability Group fail-over test with PowerShell
I have a number of SQL Server Availability Groups in my organization. Of them, most are multi-site configurations for disaster recovery. Naturally, the latency that a separate data center implies is more than my application can handle for its writes….
Connecting to an Availability Group Listener with SQL Server Management Studio
Background When a cluster has an Availability Group installed on it, there is an optional listener which is used to manage connections through fail-over events. This listener has an IP address assigned to it and, when the Availability Group fails over…
How to change the schema of a table
The other day I set out to performance tune a database deployment. The company was getting ready to implement almost a year’s worth of database schema drift where major restructuring had occurred. One of the first things that I noticed…