Administration

Hi again…
I wanted to share with you my latest experience in interviewing for a Senior SQL Server Production (no development) DBA position in Southern California. As we all have come to learn that the “typical” process is a phone interview and then if they like you they invite you for an in person interview. Typically [...]

Today I was working with SQL Server 2005 SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) and I needed to look into the server to see if there were any issues. My users were telling me that the pivot tables in their Excel spreadsheets were taking longer than usual. Microsoft does not allow you to run [...]

In SQL Server 2005 there several ways to detect a CPU bottlneck.  The first way to detect a bottleneck is by looking at the System Monitor counter Processor: % Processor Time.  If the value of this counter  is greater than 80% for  15 to 20 minutes in duration, then it is a good indication that [...]

Today a junior DBA asked me about the files with the .STB extension were for. Then I realized that other DBAs out there may not know what the .STB files are for and what creates them. The .STB files stand for STand By (STB). These files are created when a database is [...]

When your application experiences a performance problem chances are some aspect of your application has or is hitting a bottleneck. What exactly is a bottleneck? Per Wikipedia a bottleneck is a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is severely limited by a single component. A common single component [...]

Today I was going through one of my production SQL Servers and looking at the connections\spids it dawned on me that some people that are new to SQL Server might not know the different “states” of a worker thread. Here are 3 states that you will come across when executing sp_who or sp_who2:
Running - [...]

Welcome back and happy new year! Today I wanted to share with you my experience with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a 4 node cluster.
The other day we had failed over one of the nodes to test functionality to see if the Reporting Services databases failed over as well. After the fail-over [...]

Today I wanted to share with you my “painful” experience with having SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) installed on a cluster. I just got done installing and configuring a 4 node (3 active 1 passive) cluster. It has Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 Enterprise edition installed on it. I got the [...]

Today I wanted to share the different ways of maintaining a Disaster Recovery (DR) system. One of the most important functions that a Database Administrator has… is to design and implement a DR plan for a production environment. Planning for a disaster has the following aspects:
1. Creating a backup plan for [...]

Welcome back to squirrel’s blog on “everything” SQL Server. I will be covering little nuances with Database Mirroring here. Database Mirroring is a very cool feature in SQL Server 2005 when you get it setup and configured properly. I went through the growing pains of installing, configuring and troubleshooting this [...]