Administration

Welcome back and Happy Saturday!
Today I wanted to share with you that some DBAs seem to overlook the transaction log when thinking about optimizing database performance.  I myself was guilty of not considering optimizing the transaction logs for my production databases.  I am going to blog about Virtual Log Files (VLFs) and why it is important [...]

The other day i restored a QA database in compatibility level 90 (SQL Server 2005) to a production server that had SQL Server 2005 installed.  The restore went as expected however, the logins that were already there on the SQL Server had different SIDs than the users in the database that was restored.  We maintain three [...]

Today I was looking the SQL Server Agent jobs on one of my SQL Server 2000 production database servers.  I noticed one job that failed with a very cryptic error.  This was the error message reported:
DTSRun OnStart:  DTSStep_DTSDataPumpTask_6   DTSRun OnProgress:
DTSStep_DTSDataPumpTask_6; 1000 Rows have been transformed or copied.;
PercentComplete = 0; ProgressCount = 1000   DTSRun OnProgress:
DTSStep_DTSDataPumpTask_6; 2000 [...]

Hello again and welcome back!
The other day I was posting in the SQL Server news groups and I came across a person asking about which performance counters should be collected to obtain a performance load \ baseline in their production SQL Server environment.  It occurred to me there is a lot of information out there [...]

The other day I was looking on a production SQL Server and I noticed a trace file that was running but was not able to associate it to SQL Profile session. I queried sysprocesses and was unable to find a spid that was running SQL Profile. I was perplexed for a little while and started [...]

Hello again and welcome back!
I thought today’s posting to my blog should cover how to get the results of DBCC CHECKDB into a table.  Unfortunately, Microsoft does not allow you easily per se to insert the results into a table so that you might be able to generate administrative reports off of.  Well in my [...]

The other day I was trying to obtain connection information from master.dbo.sysprocesses via a linked server call using SQL Server 2005. So the statement I was running looked like this:

INSERT INTO connection
SELECT DISTINCT [name],
hostname,
program_name,
loginame,
nt_username,
net_address,
last_batch, 
getdate()
FROM OPENQUERY(”SQL1\V01″, ‘SELECT d.[name], p.hostname, p.program_name, p.loginame, p.nt_username, p.net_address, p.last_batch, getdate() FROM master.dbo.sysprocesses as p inner join master.dbo.sysdatabases as d on p.dbid = d.dbid‘)

When I execute the insert\select statement it works in [...]

The other day I found myself looking at new\different ways to monitor the health of my production SQL Server 2005 servers. I thought that there must be a better way to monitor in SQL Server 2005 than in SQL Server 2000. So as I was looking through books online and perusing the internet [...]

Today I am going to share with you what I think is important to think about when upgrading to SQL Server 2005. I have done many successful upgrades from SQL Server 2000 and I have put together a checklist of things to consider when doing your implementation. The items in [...]

Welcome back…
Today I am going to give the answers to the interview questions that I received regarding SQL Server 2005.
Question 1
What are the different versions (editions) in SQL Server 2005
Answer
SQL Server Express Edition, Workgroup Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition
Question2
What is the difference between RAID 0 + 1 and RAID 1 + 0
Answer
Here the argument [...]