April, 2007

One evening last week I sat down with Kimberly for 5 minutes to come up with a top-of-our heads list of VLDB maintenance concerns for a company migrating a multi-TB database to SQL Server 2005. This isn't in any way based on the VLDB survey I've been...

I had a question this week from someone who'd heard me say at SQL Connections (paraphrasing) "database compatibility level is mostly about query parsing" and was having trouble trying to forcibly attach a 2005 or 7.0 database to a 2000 server. His...

I was on a conference-call on Friday with a customer and we were discussing their plan to have thousands of filegroups, with a table in each, as a way to improve recovery times in the event of a disaster (the tables are unrelated to each other so this...

I was asked this question yesterday and didn't know the answer so thought it would be good for a quick post. Can you use devices from your main and mirrored backup media sets together to perform a restore? The code below creates a single-device backup...

As promised in my earlier post of an example corrupt 2005 database, here's one I've just created for SQL Server 2000. The attached WinZip file contains a backup of a simple 2000 database called 'broken' . It has a simple table called 'brokentable'...

Whenever I’m discussing index maintenance, and specifically fragmentation, I always make a point of saying ‘Make sure the index is being used before doing anything about fragmentation’ . If an index isn’t being used very much, but has very low page...

I've been asked several times over the last few weeks for an example corrupt database to play with, and for testing logic built around DBCC CHECKDB. The attached WinZip file contains a backup of a simple 2005 database called 'broken' (I can do a 2000...

Late night blog post to round out spring-break vacation... A number of customers I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks have been making use of database or file shrink in situations where they don’t really need to. There are few recurring scenarios...

From the tools team here in Redmond: We recently posted updates to address an issue in two SP2 Maintenance Plan tasks. The KB article describes the symptoms as follows: FIX: The Check Database Integrity task and the Execute T-SQL Statement task in...

So it seems that Microsoft's email system barfs when some people try to send email with 'survey' in. And I was unclear how big a database I'm interested in. To be honest, anything over 100 GB or so starts to require careful maintenance planning. So...

It’s survey time again. I’ll be doing lots around VLDB maintenance in the coming months so I’d like to get more info from all of you about what’s happening in the field. I’ll be working on Katmai features, strategizing about Katmai+, blogging on maintenance...

While we were at the SQL Server Connections conference in Orlando last week, Kimberly Tripp and I did a half-hour interview for SSWUGtv with Stephen Wynkoop. We cover a bunch of stuff around HA, database maintenance and board games. The addictive game...