May 2010 - Posts

• Why I don’t need to go on the SQLCruise

  Brent Ozar ( Blog | Twitter ) and Tim Ford ( Blog | Twitter ) are putting on a new type of event in the month of August after SQL Saturday #40 in South Florida July, 31st , properly named SQLCruise . The concept is great, at least in my opinion, you pay Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:04 AM by Jonathan Kehayias | 2 Comments Filed under: Rants and Ramblings, Miscellaneous

• Parsing SQLIO Output to Excel Charts using Regex in PowerShell

  Today Joe Webb ( Blog | Twitter ) blogged about The Power of Regex in Powershell, and in his post he shows how to parse the SQL Server Error Log for events of interest. At the end of his blog post Joe asked about other places where Regular Expressions Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2010 10:12 PM by Jonathan Kehayias | 13 Comments Filed under: Powershell Attachment(s): SQLIOResults.zip

• Reinventing the Wheel – Automating Data Consistency Checks with Powershell

  When I started in my current position at the beginning of the year, one of the first things that I did was to schedule a sit down with the various teams of Analysts that exist in our organization to find out more about their systems.  One thing I Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2010 2:24 AM by Jonathan Kehayias | 8 Comments Filed under: Powershell

• Today’s Performance Tip: Views are for Convenience, Not Performance!

  I tweeted this last week on twitter and got a lot of retweets so I thought that I’d blog the story behind the tweet. Most vendor databases have views in them, and when people want to retrieve data from a database, it seems like the most common first stop Read More... Posted Monday, May 17, 2010 7:38 PM by Jonathan Kehayias | 2 Comments Filed under: Transact-SQL, Database Administration, Programming

• Does tempdb Get Recreated From model at Startup?

  In my last post Does the tempdb Log file get Zero Initialized at Startup? I questioned whether or not tempdb is actually created from the model database or not at startup.  There is actually an easy way to prove that this statement, at least internally Read More... Posted Friday, May 14, 2010 7:32 AM by Jonathan Kehayias | 3 Comments Filed under: Database Administration, Did You Know, Internals

• Does the tempdb Log file get Zero Initialized at Startup?

  While working on a problem today I happened to think about what the impact to startup might be for a really large tempdb transaction log file.  Its fairly common knowledge that data files in SQL Server 2005+ on Windows Server 2003+ can be instant Read More... Posted Thursday, May 13, 2010 9:13 PM by Jonathan Kehayias | 9 Comments Filed under: Database Administration, Miscellaneous, Did You Know, Internals

• 5 Things SQL Server should get rid of

  Paul Randal ( blog | twitter ) started a new meme last night with his blog post " What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of? " A few bloggers have posted their top 5 lists, so here is mine. Creating Foreign Keys without mentioning Indexes This Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2010 11:12 PM by Jonathan Kehayias | 4 Comments Filed under: SQL Quiz

• Why the “Toilet” Analogy for SQL might be bad

  Robert Davis(blog/twitter) recently blogged The Toilet Analogy … or Why I Never Recommend Increasing Worker Threads , in which he uses an analogy for why increasing the value for the ‘max worker threads’ sp_configure option can be bad inside of SQL Server.  Read More... Posted Saturday, May 08, 2010 3:33 AM by Jonathan Kehayias | 2 Comments Filed under: Database Administration, Miscellaneous, Configuration

• The Database as Intellectual Property

  Every so often, a question shows up on the forums in the form of, “How do I prevent anyone from accessing my database schema, including local administrators and sysadmins in SQL Server?”  I usually laugh a little shake my head when I read a question Read More... Posted Thursday, May 06, 2010 6:31 PM by Jonathan Kehayias | 4 Comments Filed under: Rants and Ramblings, Miscellaneous, Security

• Master database Compatibility level after an In-place Upgrade

  Yesterday a forums member asked why sys.dm_exec_sql_text() wouldn’t work on one instance of SQL where he was a sysadmin while the same code worked correctly on another instance of SQL.  The initial thought was that it was some kind of permissions Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 04, 2010 12:23 PM by Jonathan Kehayias | 5 Comments