T-SQL Tuesday

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog meme is brought to us by Wendy Pastrick (blog|twitter) and the subject is “The Long and Winding Road.“

When I saw this month’s subject, I lunged forward and began to write dropping everything else that I was working on.  Why?  Any chance to incorporate SQL Server with the Beatles is worth the time and effort.  After all, they are the greatest band of all time and if you disagree then you are just going to have to live with being wrong, right?

Many moons ago, well it was actually 1997, I had written some applications in Visual Basic: yes, the old and horribly slow one, you know the one.  But then I discovered Delphi (Object Pascal for the kiddies) and wrote amazing some amazing applications.  I even wrote a few games back then just to prove to myself that I could, they were not horribly great but I felt accomplished and I often wonder where those floppies are so that I could play them again.   Programming was my passion and it felt so amazing to create something from scratch, my own creation, my own Frankenstein: “It’s Alive!”

From there a company noticed some of my freeware applications and offered to move me to Virginia and teach me to write business applications in Progress 4GL for Unix and Windows.  Wait, you are going to train me, mentor me, and pay me double my current salary.  I’m in.  Progress was an amazing product with a very well written SQL-compliant RDBMS that rivaled Sybase, Informix and Oracle only without the marketing hype.  Their claim back then was that they were in over 60% of the Fortune 500.  The problem was that with their Value Added Reseller structure, many vendors would repackage their database as their own (as was allowed if they paid enough for the rights to distribute the product), so many of those companies had no idea that their database was “Powered by Progress.”

My years with the product were amazing learning to write code that would run in Unix, compile and run in Windows and then eventually would become used inside of tags of HTML to deliver data to the web was ground breaking at the time.  I was sure that this was the future, so much so that I became a consultant for the company traveling the globe for two years helping clients with installation, troubleshooting and training.  I drank the kool-aid.  I was pretty sure that with a little marketing they would sink the Oracle juggernaut.

At one company I even administered a SQL Server 6.5 and 7.0 boxes because they had vendor software that required it and I was the database guy for Progress.  I remember thinking how SQL Server was so miniscule compared to Progress.  I remember thinking that they will never make it in this sector.  Well I was wrong about the Xbox, too.

Enter early 2004, I had just successfully completed a fulfilling project and was looking for my next contract opportunity.  The well was dry, there were no opportunities for Progress.  I had a home and a small children and my family did not want to move.  The road had ended that day.  I had to take a job as a systems administrator to make ends meet.  The dream was over.  In the words of the Beatles….

The wild and windy night, that the rain washed away

Has left a pool of tears crying for the day

Why leave me standing here? Let me know the way

Then in 2008, I started a position that was part programmer and part SQL Server DBA.  Prior to this, I contemplated going back to school and leaving the IT field.  But as the Beatles would say…

And still they lead me back to the long winding road

You left me standing here a long, long time ago

Don’t leave me waiting here lead me to your door

The dream had come full circle, I found my new passion:  SQL Server.  It really was my old passion in disguise: DATA!  Hopefully this technology will be the one for many years to come, what do you think?

SELECT * FROM fn_get_audit_file (‘g:\auditing\*’, DEFAULT, DEFAULT)

This line of code runs great for my login and I never gave it much thought because I am running it from a sysadmin account.  When asked for users to be able to run this report that is when things are getting sticky.  I cannot fathom why a simple query for log data cannot be attributed to a read-only account.  In order for you to run this select statement you either need a sysadmin level account or the CONTROL SERVER permission which pretty much gives you the keys to the kingdom.  Why would they do that?

I am sure there is a great technical reason, but why not allow it to filter down to read-only access to simply view the data?  With those permissions whoever is in charge of running the audit can manipulate the data however they see fit.  That makes no sense to me but then again who am I in the grand scheme of things?  Shortly I will post a few different scenarios in how to solve this problem.  Enjoy!

1. All of the log backups must have been taken and completed before you start the online restore.
2. If you have bulk changes in the database, the files must be online.
3. All of your bulk changes must be backed up before starting the online restore process.

In addition, I have seen it recommended that you switch your bulk-logged recovery model to the full model before starting the online process and then switching it back afterward for smoother recovery.  Enjoy!

T-SQL Tuesday

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog meme is brought to us by Bob Pusateri (blog|twitter) and the subject is “how did you come to love presenting?“

For me I am not sure that I am at that point.  I love being a presenter, I love going to the speaker dinners for SQL Saturday events, I love meeting other speakers and talking about presenting, but in all honesty I am not sure that I am in love with presenting.  But I am getting there.  Presenting still terrifies the hell out of me, but it is a fear that I set out to conquer last year as a goal in my personal development plan.

For a long time, if  an activity involved a public speaking component I avoided it like the plague.  Seriously.  I am not kidding here.  I coached Dixie Youth baseball and Pop Warner football and every year I had to give a first practice speech.  I would spend a couple of sleepless nights and I would vomit several times before muttering something from my note cards and then quickly move on to begin the practice.  The last few years I stopped doing it all together and went around to the parents individually and this worked much better for me.  Crisis averted.  Problem put back on the shelf for a later date.

After several SQL Saturdays, I started to think that I could do this again.  Some time ago, I was a consultant that also provided week-long training courses in addition to programming and DBA work in Progress 4GL RDBMS, but all of the material that I presented was created by a team (similar to a Microsoft training course) of professionals.  Whenever I got nervous in those courses, I could always go back into the material as it had notes on the slides.  It was fool-proof, and after doing them over and over I was a pro at it.  But after not doing this for twelve years, the fear took over again.

After presenting a lightning talk in Pensacola, a couple of user group meetings and a few SQL Saturdays, the fight or flight reflex has lessened and the vomiting is non-existent.  I can do this, I am doing this, and I will conquer this.  I can proudly say that I brushed the fear back and now think that I am getting better at this.  I am starting to love presenting, it has a foothold in the depth of my being.  What about you?

However, on day three we set out for the tourist destinations of my youth: the Gateway Arch and the Saint Louis Zoo.  The Gateway Arch is now a national park and it is a beautiful and spacious park at the base of the Mississippi River with the historic courthouse in the background as shown in the gallery below.  Also at the base of the Arch is the Museum of Westward Expansion which seemed much grander when I was a kid but did have some animatronic characters for me to enjoy.

Later in the day we also visited the Saint Louis Zoo which was free (with a $15 parking fee, still not sure how that’s free).  The zoo seemed bigger than when I was a kid which is always a plus.  What a great day of adventuring.  Enjoy!

Whitehaven

Day one of our anniversary vacation and we arrived in our favorite stay-over hot spot, HOTlanta! From Atlanta, we went onto Lookout Mountain Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, and the falls are breathtaking in the belly of the mountain. The hike down is gorgeous and our tour guide was hilarious. It was a great experience for the entire group.  We would recommend this stop to everyone.

From there we moved on to Saint Louis, our original destination, but not before we stopped at this excellent rest area / welcome center on the border of Kentucky and Illinois. This building, called Whitehaven, was built in the 1860s in Paducah.  Stay with us for the rest of the week as we explore the Gateway to the West.

Crossing the Mighty Mississip at night is beautiful!

The Falls

Ruby Falls

When I installed the cluster, everything was operational.  However after I applied service pack two to the 2008 R2 Enterprise nodes, Analysis Services would not start.  I didn’t notice the first time that it was after the service pack was applied until I removed everything and started over fresh.

The logs were not much help and I could not find much on the internet until I eventually found a friend who suggested that the service running SSAS needed to be in the local administrators group.  Problem solved.  Now my lesson learned is here for you as well.  Enjoy!

Thanks for your help.

If you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for it is free training!  See you there!

Work is the same dynamic, some times we need simply to walk in a different direction to get a new perspective.  Sit with your developers and see how they see the data.  Find out what problems they are having from their point of view.  Look at your environment from a different perspective and maybe you will find a new shining vista too.  Enjoy!

My wife and I were trying to decide what new adventure we would take together on our anniversary.  Being that her mother is originally from St. Louis and she hasn’t seen her family there in about twelve years, we thought this would make a great vacation getaway.  I could meet some of her family, take in a Cardinals game on opening day in the NEW Busch Stadium, and ultimately relive a great many childhood memories with my wife who experienced many of those same memories separately.

What would make this even better?  Meeting up with some #SQLFamily members or even a SQL Server User Group meeting along the way.  No such luck in St. Louis as apparently they only meet once a quarter and their meeting was this month.  Does anyone know of any meetings nearby or on the way?  Any of my #SQLFamily on the way or close by that they would want to meet up?  I will be coming through Atlanta as well.  Maybe we can get together?  Enjoy!

• Retention schedule
• Recovery models
• Disaster recovery plans
• RPO and RTO or SLAs
• Identify your backup schedule
• Identify your recovery schedule
• Identify offsite storage options and retention
• Identify your compression strategy
• Identify any third party vendor tools

I hope this helps.  Enjoy!

• sys.dm_exec_*  These provide information about sessions, connections, query executions and requests.
• sys.dm_os_*  These provide information on OS related information
• sys.dm_io_*  These provide input/output process information
• sys.dm_tran_*  These provide transaction information
• sys.dm_db_*  These provide database information

Enjoy and stay tune for more DMV information.

This week I rescanned all of my instances to figure out how many cores we had licensed and for which version.  I wanted to get all of my documentation ready to go to our contract manager when I noticed a new server that had 24 Enterprise cores that I had never heard of before.  My supervisor had never heard of the box either.

When I logged into the box, sure enough it had SQL Server installed.  The server was for a monitoring tool and when the administrators installed the software on the box instead of asking me where they could install the database they found a disk and installed SQL Server themselves.  Unlicensed.  On the same box as the software.  Without telling anyone.

When the contract manager told them how much the 24 cores would cost their department they quickly called me and asked me to kindly move their 13 GB database to one of my other servers.  It just happened recently because I scan the network every few months and had never seen this before.  Not only did they put us in jeopardy with our licensing, they had no backups setup for the database.  When confronted they said yeah that was taking up too much space on the disk.

The lesson here today boys and girls is to scan your instances and look for unknown installations regularly.  Carry on and enjoy!

Last month I blogged about using the procedure to show you the estimated backup size for the database.  But these developers were confusing unallocated space, which is actually just space in the database that has not been allocated.  For example, when you set a autogrowth interval and your database grows in accordance with the interval you will now have unallocated space until the database takes that free space.  Enjoy!

In many of my positions we have wondered how some people got their jobs and it almost always boiled down to the fact that they interviewed well for it was obvious that it was not their skill.  Which begs the question, does the interview even work anymore?

Many people have told me that it is a good indicator of personality and seeing if the person will mesh well with the team.  That smacks of prejudice to me.  If your team is like a fraternity house, who will show you that personality in the interview process?  How will you know if you have a Blutarsky or a Dorfman or even a Chip Diller (sorry could not resist a Kevin Bacon Animal House reference).  Enjoy!

SQL Schoolhouse!

Recently, I was asked the difference between a primary key and a unique key and this seemed like a good topic for a blog post.

First of all, the primary key is the key that will uniquely identify the record and enforce entity integrity.  By default this will create a clustered index on the column or columns selected.  The unique key, like the primary key, will be unique, however it creates a non-clustered index by default.  The unique key will also allow one NULL record where the primary key will not allow any.

In addition, there is only one primary key per table, whereas you can have multiple unique keys.  Enjoy!

However, I was a little sad about the death of the Virtual Restore piece of HyperBac.  This tool had great potential, especially since we just figured out how to script it to autoMAGICally restore all of our backups on a nightly basis.  Maybe they will be able to incorporate this piece into the Backup Pro tool.  Only time will tell, I guess.  Enjoy!

• Mirroring is deprecated, meaning it is going away and moving to AlwaysOn availability groups.  Now is probably not the time to devise a mirroring plan.
• You can mirror some or all of your databases on a particular instance.
• You can only mirror databases in the FULL recovery model.
• Mirroring supports only one principal and one mirror.
• All versions support witness modes but only Enterprise supports high-performance mode.
• Enterprise, Standard and the new BI version all support the high-safety mode.
• You cannot mirror a database that is using FILESTREAM file groups.
• You can only mirror user databases.

Enjoy!

Yesterday, I was asked what the difference was in some of the restoration options.  Thus, I thought this would make a good blog post as it is somewhat confusing in the beginning.

On the options page of the restore database interface in SQL Server Management Studio, there are several options than can be quite frightening to new DBAs.  I have tried to explain them here in the order that they appear on the screen.

In the Recovery State options:

• Leave the database ready to use by rolling back uncommitted transactions.  Additional transaction logs cannot be restored. (RESTORE WITH RECOVERY):  Choose this option only if you are restoring the log files now (in full or bulk-logged recovery models).  This is the default option and allows you to only go back to the last backup file.
  
• Leave the database non-operational, and do not roll back uncommitted transactions.  Additional transaction logs can be restored. (RESTORE WITH NORECOVERY):  Pick this option when you want to go to the very latest possible data!  Leaves the database in a restoring mode as you restore the backup and then all of the transaction logs generated since the backup up to the point of failure (if possible).
  
• Leave the database in read-only mode.  Undo committed transactions, but save the undo actions in a standby file so that recovery effects can be reversed. (RESTORE WITH STANDBY):  The database will be left in read-only mode.  At this point you can still apply transactions logs and is generally used when it takes too long to restore the system to a full database and you wish to use the server as a stand by server.
  

I hope this helps, enjoy!