You may disagree, but I believe it is a good practice to cluster all the SQL Server instances. That is, even when you plan to run a SQL Server instance on a single machine, you should install it in a single node cluster. The primary advantage is that you only need a single standard SQL Server build instead of one for the stand alone and one for ...

There are numerous ways to find where a SQL Server instance is running in a cluster. The most convenient tool was cluster.exe. Unfortunately, I have to say it was the most convenient tool, and no longer is because no single cluster.exe works with all versions of Windows. You could also use the PowerShell cluster cmdlets such as Get-ClusterGroup. ...

While at PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, I had a conversation with an attendee from one of the largest US companies. As expected and like any of the largest US companies, this company has multiple DBMS platforms. The conversation then turned to how SQL Server was being used, and the attendee told me that they target SQL Server primarily for their ...

This week we're going to look at some issues involving tempdb... Provide a tempdb per database #176241 : Eliminating TempDb By Adding Temp Filegroup to Each Database#281202 : multiple tempdb For these two requests, I am hoping that the Contained Databases feature (which I've talked about multiple times) will get to this capability in the ...

I recently ran into a rather freakish case in which many SQL Agent jobs on a SQL Server 2005 instance were reported to run twice at their scheduled times. And the 2nd run took place either at almost exactly the same time or only a second or two later.   Upon further examination, I could confirm the following:   The jobs did indeed ...

With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft tried to be helpful in enabling its installer to apply the service pack or hotfix automatically on the passive node(s) in a cluster. In my own experience, this has not worked out too well. Very often, when the installer flagged the upgrade status of the service pack ot the hotfix as failure next to ...

There have been a couple of issues that keep pestering the SQL Server community for those that use Vista as their client.  Example: SQL Protocols Blog entry Now Microsoft has created a KB on it:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936302,  I have tried and tested a solution that fixes this, and it is related to the KB, that ...

How can you corrupt an online SQL Server 2005 database? Okay, why would you want to do that? Well, let's say because you want to test out some DBCC commands. If you take a SQL Server 2005 database offline, you can easily corrupt it by opening it with a different program and messing up the file content. But then it's unlikely you can ...

One frequenctly asked question is, ''How do I find out via T-SQL which cluster node is running this SQL Server instance?'' There is no easy way in SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 7.0 to determine the current node of a SQL Server instance using T-SQL. The approach I use often is to run cluster.exe through xp_cmdshell, assuming you know the ...