I’ve seen many people go through the trouble of setting up database mail and configuring SQL Agent Alerts only to realize it’s not working. The reason in the cases I’ve seen is because they have simply neglected to assign a mail profile to SQL Agent. This is way more common than you would think, thus I wrote this quick blog. This check box and drop down can sometimes lead to hours of troubleshooting if you don’t know where to look. In order to receive the alerts, you must enable a mail profile. This would be the profile created during the Database Mail configuration process. To configure SQL Server Agent to…
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A key part of the SQL Server Agent is the ability to schedule jobs. While you can create one schedule for each agent job, frequently with applications like Reporting Services, users use Shared Schedules across multiple jobs. For instance, you can set a schedule to run at 8 am on week days or run every 2 hours or pick from a predefined list of schedules that already exist in the MSDB database. These are very convenient. However, if you choose to use these be sure you are keeping track of what is running for each of these shared schedules. You should not have everything running at once. This is an…
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I saw this again recently and see it too often in environments so wanted to take a second to remind everyone to cycle their error logs on a regular basis. SQL Server keeps error logs and when you reboot or restart SQL Server services the logs are cycled and a new one is created. Depending on how many logs you have configured for SQL Server to have this may include removal of the oldest log as well. Since many of pride ourselves on keeping our SQL Servers up and running, reboots may be few and far between thus our logs get large in size. When they grow out of control…
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Quite often I see database administrators set SQL Server max server memory thinking everything related to SQL Server uses this shared memory pool. This is a mistake. There are many things that rely on memory that are not part of SQL Server. Best practices state that you should leave memory allotted for the operating system. However, did you know that if you are running services like SSIS, SSAS or SSRS on the same server as the database engine that it does not use the same memory you have allocated for SQL Server? If the Max Memory setting is not configured correctly, these other serves could incur memory pressure. While the…
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Ever look back at old work and wonder what was I thinking when I did that? Or even better you mock and get disgusted over some code you stumble upon and then realize you wrote it? Today is one of those days. Lucky for me one of my clients is a company I used to work for. It’s awesome to be able to go back and work in an environment you are familiar with. However, with that, you realize when you worked there you made some decisions or wrote some code that you now shake your head at. On the other hand, it’s a really great way to see how…
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Sometimes as a newbie to SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) you don’t know about the little gold mines that are within the product that help you be a better DBA or Developer. Template Explorer is one of those. To get to it go to VIEW from the taskbar then Template Explorer. Alternatively, you can reach it with keyboard shortcut Control+Alt+T. When you click on it, another side window will appear showing you a list of all templates available within Management Studio. A basic example would be creating a new stored procedure, this template provides an easy starting point. Microsoft has even gone so far as to incorporate…
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When applying a new SQL Server cumulative update, hot fix, or upgrade SQL Server doesn’t always apply all the fixes in the patch. When you upgrade the database engine in-place, databases you had already stay at their pre-upgrade compatibility level, which means they run under the older set of optimizer rules. Additionally, many optimizer fixes are not turned on. The reason for this is that while they may improve overall query performance, they may have negative impact to some queries. Microsoft actively avoids making breaking changes to its software. To avoid any negative performance impacts, Microsoft has hidden optimizer fixes behind a trace flag, giving admins the option to enable…
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A few weeks ago, I wrote Part 1 and 2 of this series, which was a beginner’s guide to Always Encrypted. In part 3, I am going to go over what road blocks I ran into when trying to implement this solution for a client. The goal of the project was to prevent the DBA from being able to view salary information, while still allowing the application to function without issue. We were able to encrypt the data easily, but the entire process was not without issues. We had to remove default constraint values to get it to implemented. Always Encrypted does not currently support constraints. Fortunately, the defaulted zero…
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Awhile back, if you are on Twitter, you can probably recall my ranting about the 949 indexes I was reviewing. The process was to determine duplicate indexes and consolidate them or discard the unneeded ones. My ranting was not about the duplicates per se it was about the index names. It only takes a second to name an object with some name that tells what the thing is. Below I will show you some examples and give you an easy script that will help you generate your index names. Taking a little time to name things appropriately can go a long way, it can not only be time saving but…
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In this post we will pick up where we left off in Part 1, if you haven’t read that please go back and do so. Now that we have encrypted our columns, it’s time to take a look at how we decrypt them inside SQL Server Management Studio or through our applications. You’ll be surprised to see how easy it is. Verify Your Setup First, let’s verify that the table is still encrypted, and nothing changed after you ran through the Part 1 examples. To confirm, simply query sys.columns, script out the table, or query the data to check that the Birthdate column is still encrypted. USE [AdventureWorks2016CTP3] GO CREATE…
