This article aims to provide some beneficial tips about SQL Server extended events that make it easier to create and use event sessions.
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SQL Syntax Checker Tools
October 27, 2021In this article, we will look at the 2 different SQL syntax checker tools that help to find the syntax errors of the queries without executing them.
Read more »Managing the Windows Internal Database (WID)
August 25, 2021In this article, we are going to learn about the windows internal database. Microsoft windows server and their components use the Microsoft WID database to store their data. It is used to store the relational data of the following services:
Read more »Automate the SQL Server DBCC CheckDB command using Maintenance Plans
August 19, 2021In this article, I am going to explain how we can create a maintenance plan to automate the SQL Server DBCC CheckDB command.
Read more »Understanding SQL Server DBCC DBREINDEX command and its usage
August 2, 2021In this article, I am going to explain the DBCC DBREINDEX statement, its syntax, and its usage. Additionally, I am also going to cover the differences between the DBCC REINDEX and ALTER INDEX statements.
Read more »Understanding xp_fileexist and its usage
July 9, 2021In this article, we are going to learn about xp_fileexist, its usage, and alternatives. To access the file system using SQL Server queries, we can use the following extended stored procedures.
Read more »ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER statement in SQL Server
June 7, 2021In this article, we are going to explore the purpose of the ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER statement. The ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER is used to put the database in single-user mode. When any database is in single-user mode, the new user cannot connect to the database. However, the users that are already connected to the database do not get disconnected.
Read more »Different ways to change database owners in SQL Server
May 17, 2021In this article, we will explore different ways in SQL Server to change the database owner. We can use any of the following methods in SQL Server to change the database owner.
Read more »Different ways to check SQL Server uptime
April 26, 2021In this article, we are going to explore different ways to check the SQL Server uptime. We can determine SQL Server uptime by using any of the following methods:
Read more »Automate consistency checks of SQL database using Windows Task Scheduler
April 20, 2021The SQL database integrity check is one of the most crucial and important tasks of the database administrator. The database integrity task checks the structural integrity and allocation of all database objects and indexes. The integrity checks can be performed by using the DBCC CheckDB command. The CheckDB command is used to identify the corruption in the database. The command performs the following operations on the database.
Read more »Automate SQL database backups using Windows Task Scheduler
April 15, 2021In this article, we will learn how we can automate the backup of SQL database created in SQL Server Express edition. SQL Server Express edition is a lightweight database that has limited functionalities and resource allocation. The SQL Server Express edition does not support SQL Server Agent jobs, so it is tricky to automate various database administration tasks.
Read more »Automate rebuilding SQL Database indexes using Maintenance Plans
April 9, 2021Index maintenance is a vital part of a database administrator’s job. I have worked for few clients who often face performance issues in SQL Database and don’t have a dedicated DBA. I remember that one of our clients was facing performance issues. I logged in to their server and found that they did not set up any index maintenance jobs; therefore, many indexes were fragmented, causing the problem.
Read more »Automate SQL database backups using Maintenance Plans
February 12, 2021In this article, we are going to learn how we can automate the backup of the SQL database using database maintenance plans. Data is one of the most important assets of any organization, and as a database administrator, it is our prime responsibility to protect it. There are various tools available that can be used to back up the data. These tools use state of the art technology to protect the data, and some of them are very costly. Instead of using these costly tools, some organizations prefer to use SQL native backups. These backups of SQL database can be automated by SQL Server Agent Jobs or Windows’ task scheduler.
Read more »T-SQL scripts to update statistics based on the row modification
December 24, 2020In this article, we are going to learn how we can develop a T-SQL script to update statistics of tables based on the row modification. It is always a challenging task to perform maintenance on a table that has billions of rows. During the early years of my professional career, I was assigned a project and one of our clients had performance issues. The initial analysis showed that due to frequent data modifications, a specific table’s statistics become outdated.
Read more »Identify unused SQL databases
December 8, 2020In this article, I am going to show how we can identify unused SQL databases. In our organization, after release deployment, we receive the database refresh requests. To refresh the database, we were instructed to perform the following tasks:
Read more »T-SQL scripts to identify unused database files
October 30, 2020In this article, I am going to show how we can automate the report of unused database files using T-SQL.
Read more »T-SQL scripts to generate database health reports
October 21, 2020In this article, I am going to show how we can automate a database daily health report using T-SQL scripts. For a senior database administrator, it is always important to review the health of the database server. When a DBA manages many database servers, it becomes difficult to visit every server and review the status of databases, SQL jobs, and backups. To ease the monitoring, I have developed a T-SQL script that populates the following information:
Read more »Identify unused tables of SQL databases
September 24, 2020In this article, I am going to demonstrate how we can identify the unused tables of a given SQL Database. As a database administrator, we must maintain the tables and objects of the SQL Database. In my organization, when we add a new column or change the data type of a column, we export the data of the existing table in the backup table. Often, we forgot to review and maintain those backup tables. So as a solution, we decided to create a SQL Job that populates the list of unused tables and email the list to the DBA Team for review.
Read more »Refresh SQL Server Always On Availability Group databases using DBATools PowerShell
September 21, 2020In the 20th article of the SQL Server Always On Availability Group series, we will explore the process to refresh an availability group database using SQL scripts. In this article, we will use the DBATools commands for this purpose.
Read more »Monitoring activities using sp_WhoIsActive in SQL Server
March 16, 2020In this article, we will talk about sp_WhoIsActive stored procedure and how we can use it to monitor currently running activities in SQL Server.
Read more »Performance Monitoring via SQL Server Query Store
August 19, 2019SQL Server Query Store is a performance monitoring tool that helps us evaluate the performance of a SQL query in terms of several different performance metrics such as CPU and Memory Consumption, execution time and the I/O cycles consumed by the query. Query store is similar to the windows “Task Manager”. A task manager provides information about the CPU, Memory, Network and Disc consumption of a process. Similarly, the Query Store provides insight to similar information.
Read more »Understanding Graph Databases in SQL Server
August 16, 2019A graph database is a type of NoSQL database that is based on graph theory. Graph databases are ideal for storing data that has complex many to many relationships. In this article, we will study the very basics of graph databases with the help of a simple example.
Read more »Get details of SQL Server Database Growth and Shrink Events
June 25, 2019It is essential for the DBA to need to ensure the SQL Server database performance. Performance tuning is an open-ended task, and you need to ensure the monitoring of various database parameters.
Read more »Script SQL Server objects using DBATools
June 20, 2019This article gives an overview to generate scripts for SQL Server objects with Windows PowerShell tool DBATools.
Database administrators or developers require generating scripts for SQL Server objects. We might need scripts to store a copy of object script before object change, create specific objects into other database environments such as development, UAT or non-prod environment. It is an excellent practice to keep a copy of the object before making a change to it. We can easily refer to the old script and roll back if required. Usually, we use SSMS Generate Scripts wizard to get these scripts.
Read more »Get-DbaHelpIndex command in DBATools
June 5, 2019DBATools is an open-source PowerShell that contains a collection of useful commands. In this series of articles on DBATools (see TOC at the bottom) we performed installation of it. We also explored commands to do database backups, database restoration, Identity column maximum range threshold and create a SQL database.
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