I did a presentation today at the Microsoft offices here in Salt lake City. It was on administration of SQL 2005. Aaron Zupancic Presented on Dev topics for SQL 2005 and Scott Golightly presented on BI. For myself and Scott the demo gods were not smiling on us. We both had some demo’s go south very quickly. None of mine seemed to work well. Which was surprising since I tested them the night before. Just goes to show you should test them 5 minutes before you go on. I also have a firm belief that Aaron paid off the Demo gods to make sure his went well. I’m not sure where he sent the check but I need to find out for my next presentation.
Overall I think it went pretty hopefully everyone learned something about 2005. I know I got information out of it and a day that you learn something is a good day.
Pat
This was a little strange one we got in our Dev environment today. I was changing the default for a column to not allow nulls and I got this message back from S2k5
Skipping replication schema version logging since systranschemas table is not present in database 10.
This database was previously replicated but we got rid of all replication on it way before we moved it to 2005. So I was curious to find that it was talking about replication when it showed it was not replicated? I was even more surprised since the next script I had to run was removing the primary key and adding a new one with some changes. It wouldn’t allow me to do this since it said the table was replicated. After trying sp_helppublication and various other replication sprocs and looking Mgnmt studio there was nothing that said replication was there. So one of the other dba’s here tried sp_removeDBreplication on that db and that worked and then I was able to drop it. Not really sure why or what kept this replication hanging around but it was good that he was able to do that so we could get the primary key added.
Pat
So what is needed for a DBA Toolbox to deal with all the issues that arise for Dba’s?
This is what I’ve come up with so far. If you have more suggestions I would love to hear from others to fill out the list more. I’m not trying to make the perfect list at this point just looking for a good outline to start some discussion and find other things that might come up.
Maintenance
For Performance
Updating stat’s
Reindexing/defrag
File growth Control or monitoring
Stats monitoring,
Wait stats,
Perf counters,
For Integrity
Checkdb
Hardware level checking?
For Backup/recovery
Backup schedule/Program
Restore schedule
Disaster Mode
For Connection issues
For corruption
For down server/Suspect mode issues
Best Practices
For DB Design
For Sp programming
For Hardware Design
Pat
So my pass summit didn’t go exactly as I had hoped. On Monday afternoon I ate something that didn’t agree with me at all and spent most of Tuesday very sick from it. I made it to some of the volunteer sessions but missed out on a lot. For those of you that I’m the regional mentor for I apologize I wish I could have made it to more of it. I also missed the opening reception and the Sql Server Central party which was a big bummer.
Wednesday I started to feel better but was pretty weak and didn’t dare eat much. I was very happy to accept the 2006 PASSion award Wednesday morning before the Keynote. It was a great honor thank you to all in the membership committee that voted for me. Thank you also to Rushabh who nominated me.
Of the sessions I went to during the Summit I really liked Kalen Delaney’s Session on Metadata in 2005. This was helpful to learn where 2005 is storing some of it’s information. Andrew Kelly had an great presentation on monitoring sql server and things to look for when your monitoring. I spoke with him later for a podcast also on some suggestions he had for raid and hardware configuration. I consider Andrew one of the best on the topics for hardware and raid configurations so It was great to hear him talk about it.
Overall once again I had a great PASS Conference I think for me it’s been more and more transitioned into the networking aspect of the conference and less just about the sessions. If you attend a PASS conference, your local chapter, or a Regional Event just remember to speak up and talk to the person next to you. That’s what it’s all about making those connections will serve you very well over the next years. Hell maybe you’ll even meet new friends that you’ll actually miss because you only get to see them once a year at PASS. Then again you’ll probably meet a few that you wonder if you shouldn’t return to PASS in case they are there.
Volunteer anytime you get a chance for PASS it’s a great organization and it’s all about helping people.
In case I don’t blog again before Thursday. Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
Pat
Ok So It sucks but I’m still at work at 7:00p.m. MST. Why do Finance departments never tell IT they have plans of upgrades to there Great Plains software? Then again why do IT Departments let Finance control that? J
That’s not what this blog is about right now. It’s about getting ready for the best Conference of the year. That’s right it’s time for PASS again. This year I’ve got a very busy schedule. Not to mention I haven’t even looked at the Session schedule yet.
So here’s the perspective from someone who volunteered way too much. J
Sunday and Monday are going to be time with my wife. J I can’t wait to see some of the city with just her. J
Tuesday is all day Sessions for volunteer’s I don’t even know how I’m going to make it to all of them since I belong to 3 committee’s and they are all having meetings at the same time! Tuesday evening is the opening party and the Sqlservercentral party. Which I’ll probably make some sort of appearance at. After that probably a late night at the bar with some friends!
Wednesday Doing a presentation for Red-Gate at there booth at 11:45 Stop by if you want to hear about Execution plans. Lunch with the mountain men! (You guys rock). Later in the day some Chapter committee information which I’m really looking forward to. Then late that night the Volunteer party. This alone is a good reason to volunteer for PASS last year it rocked and I had a lot of fun. Even if I did leave on the early bus. J
Thursday Some good Breakfast sessions for Mvp’s and of course Steve Ballmer’s keynote which I don’t want to miss. Then more pass meetings throughout the day. I hope to get a few sessions in there also. I hope to hit the PSS Service center also for some of there presentations and the hands on labs. Hopefully I’ll have time for this today or Friday. The night will be wrapped up with an MVP party going on.
Friday Nothing scheduled yet besides sessions. Finally a full day to take in the classes and see what is being presented. Since I haven’t looked at the session schedule yet I guess I don’t know what I’m going to yet but I plan on mapping some things out tomorrow so maybe I’ll update the blog then.
Oh and I’ll be doing interviews and podcasts throughout the conference. Look for the really big guy in the Fedora! Stop by and I’ll interview you. J
Last year I promised that I would post messages from PASS and sessions. I hold no promises this year since I plan to spend most of my nights interviewing or drinking with friends. J
Hope to see you there!
Well since I told myself I would blog more I better start doing it.
Someone posted a great link to the PASS book in PDF format on the PASS site. This is the one they hand out when you get there so if you want to look through it more before hand in digital format or print some of it here’s a link that will take you there.
http://www.sqlpass.org/client_files/content/PASS_OnsiteProgFINAL.pdf
pat
I’m making a commitment to blog more frequently in the future!
Ok so I finally finished putting together the First Utah Code Camp. It was a lot of fun the day off. It was a lot of stress building up to it. Well worth the effort in my mind though because most everyone had a lot of good things to say. Since that’s over with now I have to focus on the next major hurdle. PASS!
That’s right PASS is just a few short weeks away and even though I’m not presenting PASS takes up much of my time. I belong to quite a few committees’ and help out with different things so I’ll be very busy this year at pass. I’ve also agreed to do a 10 minute presentation at the Red-Gate booth at 11:45 on Wednesday in the exhibit hall. It will be on Execution plans and what to look for. Real quick and simple just trying to give some good information out there. Stop by if you’re in the area!
After PASS its right back into getting ready for the next Code Camp. Which I’m working on securing the next location for. Most likely Neumont University again. Hopefully with more sponsors this time and lot’s more people!
Pat
Utah Code Camp
October 21st 2006
Neumont University
Salt Lake City, UT
The local .NET Users Group and SQL Server Users Group is conducting a “Code Camp” for local software programmers next month at Neumont University. The code camp follows the Code camp manifesto that it is for the community by the community and always free. We are looking forward to excellent sessions on lots of different topics.
The Saturday, October 21st event is scheduled from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The conference is free please register at www.msutahevents.com . We will have sessions for both Developers and DBA’s.
We will have a Sponsors area with lots of giveaways!
If you would like to speak or are interested in speaking Please email me at pat_wright@sqlpass.org . Or visit www.msutahevents.com for more information.
pat
I should really blog things in here besides just events coming up!
Just an fyi for anyone in the SLC area. We are putting on a SQL PASS Code camp on May 31st 2006. It will be from 8-5:00 at the Ms offices. It is free and open to all. We are limiting registration to only 60 though so register quickly! The registration site is listed below. Hope to see you all there. I am still also taking speakers and sponsors if anyone is interested. Thanks!
http://utpasscodecamp.mollyguard.com
Pat
Ok I'm a DBA I don't make any mistake i'm not a developer. But I've been faced with an issue that span's both and I'm trying to help a developer figure out the best way. So if anyone has any suggestions let me know!
What were looking for is the best way to constrain drop down boxes based on there previous entries. So on a form we have 4 drop down boxes. Something like different types of service and different products within those services. We only want the products for that service not all products. So after choosing the service what's the best way to constrain the product list? There is an entry in the products table but it will be quite a few joins and i don't really want to do that everytime someone is pushing the drop down button. I thought of a table that holds pretty much all of it but i can't think of one way to still get it all in a decent speed. How about a stored proc that passes one variable then 2 then 3 and so forth and so on? That might be an option also. I haven't found a ton on the web so if anyone has suggestions let me know. Thanks
pat
This was stolen from Aaron's Blog!. I am to lazy to re-type this myself! :)
Last week we had overwhelming success with our SQL Server 2005 Overview event, that people have been banging down the doors for more. By popular demand, therefore, we are pleased to invite you to a follow-up event. If you were unable to attend the first session for one reason or another and would like to attend this one, please check it out! We had a great time doing it and it was a lot of fun.
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/ctp_sp1.mspx
If your playing with 2005 or thinking about it. Better go get the CTP of sp1. Of course this isn't suggested for production systems it is only a CTP. Good place to go and report bugs also is at the product feedback center.
Happy testing!
Pat
So I did an overview 2005 presentation yesterday at the Salt lake city MS offices. The slides will be posted to www.msutahevents.com. It was fun and overall I had a good time seems like most people are really interested in 2005. I was reading through the reviews and it looks like I didn’t do to bad. J I apologize to some of you who wanted more in depth on the migration and installation aspects. We were going more for an overview so I didn’t go to far in depth on that topic. Perhaps a follow up in the UG for SLC would be good.
Oh one thing I did learn from yesterday is that you can Disable a DDL trigger instead of fulling dropping it. Here’s an example from BOL
CREATE TRIGGER safety
ON DATABASE
FOR DROP_TABLE, ALTER_TABLE
AS
PRINT 'You must disable Trigger "safety" to drop or alter tables!'
ROLLBACK;
GO
DISABLE TRIGGER safety ON DATABASE
GO
On a side note if you want an interesting article on something not even released yet. Check out Computerworld!
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,109567,00.html
Thanks to Kent Tegels for finding this.
Pat
Has anyone out there worked with Veritas/Symantec and the I3 product? We are looking to put it in to use here and while I like the SQL Server side to it the rest of it for our environment is all looking at the performance tuning aspect for the website. Our guys here are hoping more for an Exception handling issues like what Avicode can provide. But I like the performance monitoring capabilities of I3 for the DB.
Just curious if anyone has opinions out there. It’s got a pretty hefty price tag on it also.
Any other suggestions?
Pat
The script below should give you the servername for each server you connected to. But what if the second one is offline? Or perhaps you don’t have login permission to it? Then it should ignore the error and go to the third one right? No it doesn’t. For some reason on error ignore seems to do just about nothing. I’ve tried it in lots of different methods in this script and I can’t get it to ignore and keep going. Anyone else run into this?
:connect sqllaunchvpc
select srvname from master..sysservers where srvid = 0
GO
:connect sqllaunchvpc\sqldev01
:ON ERROR ignore
select srvname from master..sysservers where srvid = 0
GO
:connect sqllaunchvpc\sqldev02
:ON ERROR ignore
select srvname from master..sysservers where srvid = 0
GO
Pat
Alright so I haven’t had the best week for my SQL databases lately. But that’s ok they are getting better and those things that don’t kill us make us stronger right. J
I ran into an interesting Performance counter issue yesterday. SQL Server stopped tracking stats inside its engine for major items like wait stats, and Read,cpu,writes for traces. This was a little odd and really screwed things up for us since we were trying to find a performance issue. So I found this KB Article . We found that if you have perfmon running against the server when you reboot this is caused by this. Now I’ve had perfmon up tons while rebooting but I’m starting to wonder if SQL Sentry might have helped out since they take more counters and more frequently. So we stopped all perfmon’s to the server and I stopped the sentry service and this time they came back up ok. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that sentry does this it’s just a necessary item. Or move to SP4 which is now in our near future. J
Pat
Once again I have found a dislike for SQL Mail. I’m still using 2000 on all but my DW servers and I still have to deal with SQLMail. I know I could move all my stored procs and everything else to another SMTP mail but I choose not to. So Why am I complaining about it now! Because I have to stop and start my service just to clear out some email issues because outlook is trying to pop up a box to a service.
This is out of this Kb Article
Q12: Why does SQL Mail stop responding (hang)?
A12: If SQL Mail hangs periodically, the most likely cause is the loss of a connection to the mail server. Experience shows that SQL Mail is more likely to stop responding when you use an Internet mail (POP3/SMTP) server, but it can also stop responding if a connection to an Exchange server fails.
What happens is that the mail client attempts to connect to the mail server. If the connection fails, a message from the mail client appears that requests user action as to whether to continue or cancel. The message does not appear on the server because SQL Mail is run from the SQL Server service. Because a message does not appear, no user action can occur and SQL Mail waits indefinitely. Even if you re-establish the network connection, SQL Mail does not automatically reset and retry. You must stop and restart the SQL Server service before you can begin sending messages again.
Another possible reason for SQL Mail to stop responding is a new Outlook security feature that warns when a non-Outlook application is sending e-mail. SQL Mail for SQL Server 6.5 and SQL Server 7.0 are such non-Outlook applications. If a security dialog box window appears when SQL Mail is sent, this has the same effect of making SQL Mail stop responding as if the connection to the mail server were lost.
So I guess I should just stop complaining and get on with it. I needed to reboot my server tonight anyways right. J
Pat
For anyone out there in the SLC, UT valley here's a two day training coming up. If your into ASP .NET this would be a great class to attend.
pat
You are invited to attend a ASP 2.0 Web Applications training class. Microsoft is pleased to offer this training at no charge
REGISTRATION ENDS February 10, 2006 by 12 noon
Elements of this syllabus are subject to change.
This two-day course provides students with the knowledge and skills to create ASP.NET 2.0 applications. It will show the advancements from ASP.NET 1.x to
ASP.NET 2.0 in creating applications. The course focuses on the new features and functionality of ASP.NET. The course includes sample code in both Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft Visual C#®.
Audience
This course is intended for experienced, professional Web application developers, including those employed by software companies or working on corporate development teams.
At