Getting A Clue About Your Databases

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Getting A Clue About Your Databases

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Gregor Borosa

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 12:09 AM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Getting A Clue About Your Databases

Post #633119

SuperDBA-207096

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 4:13 AM

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Good article, lots of useful info.
I think this beats going in and poking around blindly!

Post #633239

Ian Massi

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 6:30 AM

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What an excellent idea! I used to just poke around blind as well. Trying that on a database where the tables all had 4 character names (which were abbreviations from Russian) and the fields had 8 character names (again, from Russian), it's hard to find stuff. Something like this would have helped a lot. I may use these in the future since I happen to set up data transfers from different systems.

Post #633316

Gregor Borosa

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 6:42 AM

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Hi, well thanks :) I also tried to make it more "out of the box thing", so you'd just call one procedure and get some results. But each db is unique, so when you are exploring it, some parameters do have to be adjusted, if only to loose matching of table or column names etc.

Post #633337

Megistal

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 7:10 AM

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First thanks for the scripts, they will surely help me on some occasions. (the one that get the dependencies instead of viewing them in the tiny box in the enterprise manager)

What I would like to bring is when testing them out I used a database that I was very comfortable with and found that the information that I gathered was not very helpful for someone who would need to get a quick overview of that database type in particular.

Not because the scripts does not work well but because the database work differently than the intended proposed solution and this is a scenario that could happen to others as well. I would like to propose you an additional approach.

I believe, when the database has run a bit, is to get the statistics on index scan / seek etc as the primary way to get information about usefulness of a table instead of the table size / rows.

In my case the most worthy tables only contains a few tenth of rows and looking at them from the index scan / seek reveal that information.

What do you think of this additional approach?

Post #633367

Gregor Borosa

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 7:27 AM

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Thanks for the suggestion, well worth of consideration! I guess I was so desperate looking at some databases I got recently, with nearly half of all tables empty or with max 1 row (really), so I focused on that metric. Combining few methods or trying various approaches is generally the way to go, I suppose.

Post #633380

Megistal

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 7:50 AM

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Yes I understand your points, there's not a solution that will fit for every problem.

If I could have time I would expand your queries to add a weighting mechanism for some criteria (index, size, row count, update date etc) and let the dba choose how she/he what to configure it with default value to run out of the box.

Post #633410

cy-dba

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 7:52 AM

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Good article! There's nothing worse than trying to learn a database that has inherent encryption. :)

Post #633414

Otis-844278

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 8:02 AM

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Hello. It must be noted that to perform the coding as presented, one must have 'Admin' rights to the database.

Post #633429

Paul DB

Posted Friday, January 09, 2009 8:16 AM

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Excellent article! Smooooth

Very impressive topic and easily readable!

I look forward to your future articles!

Paul DB

Post #633454

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