The Rambling DBA: Jonathan Kehayias : Database Administration

Making Use of Plan Explorer in my own Environment

Jonathan Kehayias — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 03:50:47 GMT

Back in October 2010, I briefly blogged about the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer in my blog post wrap up for SQL Bits 7 and how impressed I was with what I saw from a Alpha demo standpoint from Greg Gonzalez ( Blog | Twitter ) while I was at SQLBits 7 in York. ...(read more)

Parsing the sqlserver.sql_text Action in Extended Events by Offsets

Jonathan Kehayias — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 02:05:43 GMT

A couple of weeks back I received an email from a member of the community who was reading the XEvent a Day blog series and had a couple of interesting questions about Extended Events. This person had created an Event Session that captured the sqlserver.sql_statement_completed...(read more)

Using Substring() in XML FLOWR Queries

Jonathan Kehayias — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 03:41:24 GMT

Tonight I was monitoring the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter for a response to a question I asked when Randy Knight ( Twitter ) asked a question about using SUBSTRING in FLOWR statements with XML. #sqlhelp Is there a way to do a SQL Type "LIKE"...(read more)

Learn Who Started that Trace with the Default Trace

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:00:00 GMT

This is not Extended Event related but it came from a question on Twitter about how to tell who and from what machine a server side trace was created, and there is no way to explain this in 140 characters so here’s a blog post. This information...(read more)

Some Thoughts on Clustering SQL Server Virtual Machines

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 04:58:24 GMT

On my blog post Virtualizing SQL on VMware Reference List , Oscar Zamora ( Blog | Twitter ) asked the following question in a comment: As a virtualized instance has the benefit of "failing over" to another physical box, would you consider clustering...(read more)

TSQL Tuesday #11 – Misconceptions - The Tempdb Log File and VLF Counts

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 02:18:49 GMT

This post is part of the monthly community event called T-SQL Tuesday started by Adam Machanic ( blog | twitter ) and hosted by someone else each month. This month the host is Sankar Reddy ( blog | twitter ) and the topic is Misconceptions in SQL Server...(read more)

TSQL Tuesday #11 Misconceptions – Enable AWE on 64bit SQL Servers

Jonathan Kehayias — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:58:25 GMT

Policy Based Management and the Unknown LoginMode

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 05:47:10 GMT

The topic of this post comes from a question on the MSDN Forums, and had it not been for some advice from Buck Woody ( blog | twitter ), I never would have known the answer. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with Policy Based Management, in particular,...(read more)

The Importance of a Mentor

Jonathan Kehayias — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:30:00 GMT

When I am asked how I got to where I am in my career, or how to make the transition to being a DBA, I usually have to think about my answer before I respond. I realize that most people won’t be able to follow the same path that I took to get where...(read more)

Creating a Database Role to Allow Users to Script Object Definitions

Jonathan Kehayias — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 02:47:19 GMT

In the past month I’ve answered a couple of questions similar to: Is there a database role I can assign (other than dbo) that will allow a user to "see" stored procedures. As it is, I have granted the user db_datareader so, from SSMS,...(read more)

There is no such thing as a “Small Change” to a production database

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:50:48 GMT

It seems like every week I get hit up with some kind of “Its a view only for this specific report,” or “It is a simple change that the vendor would have made if they had access” type of request related to SQL Server. If you’ve never dealt with me,...(read more)

Understanding the MD3000/3000i Storage Array configuration options

Jonathan Kehayias — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:45:57 GMT

Yesterday I happened to catch Brad McGhee’s ( Blog | Twitter ) tweet about receiving a new MD3000 DAS storage array today. I shot him a tweet that I could send him information about using the command line interface for the MD3000 to do advanced...(read more)

Should SQL Server advanced features be available a la carte?

Jonathan Kehayias — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:32:00 GMT

SQL Server users love the new features inside of the platform and each new release brings more exciting enhancements that motivate end users towards upgrading from previous editions. However, one of the biggest gripes I see from the SQL Server Community...(read more)

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

Jonathan Kehayias — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:38:51 GMT

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)

Does tempdb Get Recreated From model at Startup?

Jonathan Kehayias — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:32:00 GMT

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)