We got a call last week about an application that was running slowly. The server was showing about 80% CPU utilization consistently, IO was through the roof etc. It was taking something like 15-20 seconds to log in (doesn’t seem like much unless you are used to 4 or 5).… Read more

Most DBAs have at least some idea what the system databases are for. Master has the list of databases & logins, msdb is jobs and backups, tempdb is for temp tables and sorting. Obviously there is a lot more to each of these, but that is the absolute basics, and… Read more

I just wanted to do a brief highlight of a handy little object property. For those of you who aren’t aware there are a handful of “property” functions available that can give you all sorts of information about your object, database etc. For example DATABASEPROPERTY, DATABASEPROPERTYEX, OBJECTPROPERTY, OBJECTPROPERTYEX, FILEPROPERTY etc. Read more

Problem: You’ve added columns to the base table of one of your views, but the view isn’t reflecting the change.

Over the years I’ve seen lot’s of views created similar to this one.

CREATE VIEW vw_TableView AS
	SELECT * FROM TableName

Generally the argument is that if I put “SELECT… Read more

This isn’t really one of those features of SSMS that I’ve used a great deal. At least didn’t until recently. For those that don’t know, if you right-click on the tab of a query window you will get, among other things, options for a new tab group.

If you pick… Read more

I just had the interesting task of finding the port number that one of the instances I deal with is using. Normally this is a trivial task. I log on to the server, open up SQL Server Configuration Manager and check out the TCP/IP properties.

In this case however it’s… Read more

Recently I received a security request and realized I wasn’t comfortable in my ability to script out the t-sql commands I needed. By “comfortable” I mean I couldn’t create a login, then create the user, then add that user to a couple of roles and grant it permissions to some… Read more