Category: SQL Server Administration
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Distributed Replay
Distributed Replay is a feature that was first introduced with SQL Server 2012. It allows you to play a set of recorded transactions against a SQL Server database. This can be extremely useful if you’re doing hardware or SQL Server version upgrades and want to test the performance impacts of…
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Poor results in I/O tests due to Windows Task Scheduler settings
Not a long ago I was doing a database cluster delivery to one of our customers and as a part of that process, I scheduled our regular set of test runs for the storage. The results of the tests we ran were bad and none of the changes we did…
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Windows Firewall and antivirus software configurations for SQL Server.
One of the more important duties of a DBA is to make sure that their databases and the data is secure. In this post we’ll be looking at two utilities to increase the security of your server, the Windows Firewall and an antivirus software. Like with about everything else related…
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How to change options for multiple databases the easy way.
Changing options for multiple databases can be time-consuming when done one database at the time. With just few databases you might be fine using the Management Studio and doing changes through the GUI but when you have dozens, or hundreds, of databases and only some of them are having wrong…
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Mentored by Paul Randal, my experiences from the first months.
It’s a last day of my combined summer vacation and paternal leave and for the last week my thoughts have, now and then, drifted momentarily to work related things like trying to remember my laptop password. This is, at least for me, a common occurrence. With the end of the…
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Review: Diagnostic Scripts by Glenn Berry
I’m finally getting back to the “Tools of the Trade” series with a third post on some of my favorite (and free) SQL Server tools. This time on the spotlight is the Diagnostic Scripts by Glenn Berry. The scripts can be found from his blog, here. The whole package is…
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End of Lifecycle for Windows 2003 R2 and SQL Server 2005
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that just like all good things come to and end so does the extended support for these two Microsoft products. First will be the Windows 2003 R2 with the end of lifecycle date set to July 14 2015 and soon after that SQL Server…
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Management Studio Query Templates
Did you know that SQL Server Management Studio comes with a number of ready made templates for writing queries? If not, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Lot of people I’ve talked with aren’t familiar with these, even though they’re not all that well hidden secret. Let’s take a look at…
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RSS feeds about Microsoft KB articles
Just a quick tip this time, but one that can save you lot of time and manual work. One of the information sources that all administrators, both Windows and SQL Server alike, should follow is the Microsoft Knowledge Base. However as there are new articles coming in daily, going to…
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Review: Ola Hallengrens Maintenance Solution
SQL Server offers out-of-the-box solution to create a workflow of tasks that can be used to optimize, backup and run consistency checks on your databases. These workflows, commonly known as Maintenance Plans, are actually Integration Services packages that are run either by scheduling them as SQL Server Agent jobs or…