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MN Pass

It's Official

Today I became ….. certified database administrator – I passed the final exam 70-444. After more than 10 years of administering databases – I finally officially did it.

August 25th, 2008 | Category: SQL | Leave a comment

SQL Performance Trouble Shooting – the basics from Microsoft

  1. Check Activity Monitor
    1. Anything running?
    2. Blocking/wait times
    3. Goto Locks and check lock strategy
  2. SQL Error Log
    1. Any errors? If so investigate
  3. Resource utilizations
    1. DMVs
      1. sys.dm_exec_query_stats
        1. Look at: Total physical reads, logical reads, number to executions, total time, (divide those two to get average)
        2. Join with sys.dm_exec_sql_text
  4. Performance Monitors
    1. Processor Time
    2. Memory
    3. SQL Server Statistics
      1. Batch requests/sec
      2. Compilations
      3. Recompilations – high CPU time (use fully qualified name to avoid recompiatoins)
    4. SQL Wait stats
    5. SQLServer Memory Manager
    6. Physical Disk – Average Disk Read and write – Less than 10 ms on SAN
  5. Trace files – created default
  6. Event Viewer
May 12th, 2008 | Category: SQL, SQL Performance, Tuning | Leave a comment

Weekly Challenges 5/5/08

Here’s this week’s challenges….

1. Ran SQLIOStress test on all servers in one environment – here’s an overview of what it does
– I did graph the results and found that although the configurations where nearly the same on two of our top end servers – the speed was slightly better on one. I’m still trying to get to the root cause.
2. Four SQL 2005 installs on non standard servers in one of our environments.
– one had reporting services with it
3. Log Shipping – I sent up two environments with Log Shipping on four primary servers.
- Two had native log shipping
- Two has SQL Lite Speed Log Shipping
4. A few performance issues that I will post about later.

May 6th, 2008 | Category: SQL, Weekly Challenges | Leave a comment

Weekly Challenges 4/25/08

Here’s this week’s weekly challenges….

  1. New release went out last Friday, 4/18/08 – lots and lots of SQL servers
    1. Two SQL 2005 Clustered 64 bit
    2. Two SQL 2005 64 bit Log Shipping servers
    3. Three SQL 2005 Utility servers
    4. Eight SQL 2005 Express servers
    5. One SQL 2000 utility server
  2. I spent most of the week in in the “War” room with a consultant from Microsoft.
    1. High CPU, slower performance issue on the biggest database
    2. We updated statistics with full scan and things were under control.
    3. Here’s some information on:
      1. Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in Microsoft SQL Server 2005
      2. sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats
  3. Contiunied to get the performance testing environment up to speed and level set with production – all 16 SQL servers listed above are replicated in our performance testing environment.
April 27th, 2008 | Category: SQL, SQL Performance, Weekly Challenges | Leave a comment

Weekly Challenges 4/4/08

This was another fun filled week with new SQL issues I hadn’t experienced in smaller environments.

1. I installed the wrong version of SQL on a server. It was a miscommunication between the network guy and myself as I read the OS column which was supposed to be Enterprise – I assumed it was SQL version column – anyway that was a couple of hours of work to fix.
2. I had to document all the servers post installation which mainly focused on some standard settings and some user login information. I’m planning a separate post for these issues.
3. I was asked to tune a report that was using sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats on a large DB. It was taking 45 minutes to run – if it returned data or not. I plan to write a separate post on this as well.
4. I found this blog from a guy who’s got some pretty good tips.

April 4th, 2008 | Category: Clustering, SQL, Weekly Challenges | Leave a comment

Weekly Challenges 3/28/08 – SQL 2005 Clusters

It’s been a heckuva week…At my previous job, I went from working with one big beefy 64 bit, dual processor, with 4 GB of RAM and about 200 GB of total space. This week, I installed and configured SQL 2005 64 bit edition on two two-node clusters and three single node clusters. All of them had between 8 and 32 GB of ram, between 4 and 8 processors and one had almost 3 TB of disk space. It’s a bit of a different environment.

Here’s some good site I found on Clustering and SQL performance:
SQL-Server-Performance’s – SQL Server 2005 Clustering Best Practices
Microsoft’s – Clustered SQL Server do’s, don’ts, and basic warnings
Technet’s – Top Tips for SQL Server Clustering

And some more from Microsoft
SQL Server 2005 Failover Clustering
SQL Server 2000 Failover Clustering
Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition–Cluster Server
Microsoft Cluster Server Administrator’s Guide
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

March 28th, 2008 | Category: Clustering, SQL, Weekly Challenges | Leave a comment

Passed the 70-443 Exam

Today I took the Microsoft Exam 70-443: “PRO: Designing a Database Server Infrastructure by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005″ and I passed. That’s one step closer to certification for SQL 2005. I over studied and I’ve got all the correct Microsoft answers in my head, so I’m going to try to schedule the 70-444 exam soon.

February 6th, 2008 | Category: SQL | Leave a comment

Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist for SQL Server

I am officially a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist for SQL Server. I passed the MCTS exam, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Implementation & Maintenance on Tuesday.

November 25th, 2007 | Category: SQL | Leave a comment

Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005

Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005: “Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005″

August 9th, 2007 | Category: SQL | Leave a comment

SQL Server 2008 CTP

I don’t know if I put this out here before or not, but here’s a link to the SQL 2008 CPT site.

SQL Server 2008 CTP: “SQL Server 2008 Community Technology Preview”

July 27th, 2007 | Category: SQL | Leave a comment
 
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