Author Archives: SQLGator
Sunday Funday
We continue our Sunday Funday series today with another SQL Song (can you tell yet that all I can think about lately in my free time #SQLKaraoke at this year’s SQL PASS Summit). In today’s installment of Sunday Funday, we bring you a funny song called 50 Ways to Inject Your SQL. Enjoy!
Saturdays in the Fall
Saturdays in the Fall mean one thing in the South: College Football. In case you did not really know, College Football is king in the South. The South Eastern conference has won the last three national championships including one were both teams were from the SEC.
It is even more surprising because the competition in the SEC is fierce and the teams regularly beat up on each other. For example, at the beginning of the season, the SEC regularly puts 8-10 teams in the top 25 teams which cannot last because when teams play themselves obviously one of them has to lose.
Today’s match-up is Florida versus Tennessee, which has a strong history the last 25 years in deciding the SEC Eastern division outcome. Let the Big Gator Growl! Enjoy!
I Use Math Daily!
My daughter is a senior in high school and she is taking advanced placement statistics which sparks a daily debate in our house. When will I actually use this in real life?
I use math daily is my usual response. For example, I use the common math word problem continuously on the road:
The jerk in front of me is driving ten miles under the speed limit and the car in the opposing lane is driving 55 mph. Based upon my depth perception, she appears to be a half-mile away, at what speed will I have to accelerate to overtake the jerk and not hit oncoming car in a head-on collision. This is life or death so I would so math is pretty important.
I also look at my dash panel and see how many miles to remaining until I reach an empty gas tank whereby an advanced word problem calculation occurs:
Given my great american truck gets 17 miles per gallon (come on Prius build a truck that gets 50 mpg for regular sized people to fit in then I will be impressed with your hybrid) and I have 300 miles until empty how many trips to work at 60 miles round trip will I be able to get until I get paid again next Friday? Which leads to the calculation of how much do I have remaining in my bank account in order to subsidize the sheik’s newest harem?
That does not even include licensing for servers and software which requires a Ph.D. for Microsoft and VMWare, but luckily I do not do that on a daily basis. So, yes kids math is important unless you want to die in a head-on collision or be stuck on the side of the road without gas.
Enjoy your weekend everyone!
Be Cooperative!
This may sound like common sense, but BE COOPERATIVE! Lately, I have felt some stress in certain areas at work and it all boils down to people not being cooperative. There is nothing to be gained from putting up road blocks and preventing people from doing their respective job. Granted there are times when you have to stop people from doing things like giving out SA passwords to developers. However, if they need your help, by all means BE COOPERATIVE. It can go a long way in your happiness and theirs as well as your teams effectiveness. That is all! Enjoy!
Outlook Rules Are Your Friend
If you are like me, you receive quite a bit of automated e-mails from all of your SQL Server jobs and maintenance plans. This can take a fair amount of time to read these e-mails daily. Until now!
Outlook rules and alerts are a great way to manage this workload. First of all, and most importantly, use a unique description in the Notify Operator Task for maintenance plan notifications, such as Figure 1. Be consistent! Use this same string in all of your backup tasks in your maintenance plans.
Figure 1
Then create a rule in Outlook (Tools -> Rules and Alerts -> New Rule) to handle these messages. Personally, I set them to move to another folder to keep them organized, look for specific words in the body (the phrase we put consistently in our notification tasks), and make sure they come from the e-mail account that I setup to alert me from all of my servers (as shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2
From here, let the fun begin as I then do the following (see Figure 3):
- Mark them as high importance
- Flag the message for follow-up today
- Move it to the specified folder (I know we did this on the last step, but it is highlighted on this step as well, silly Outlook)
- Display a specific message, Database Backup has FAILED, in the New Item Alert window to ensure that I see it as it happens (granted most jobs are at night, but it will be there waiting for me in the morning)
- Display a Desktop Alert (can you tell that this is a big deal?)
Figure 3
From here you can name the rule and finish the task. I also like to setup a rule for successful jobs that searches for a successful string that I have designated, but in that case I mark the e-mail as read and move it to the folder in case I need to search for it later.
For SQL Server Agent jobs, you have to do things just a little bit different since you cannot set a custom string for the alert message. In that case, search for “STATUS: Succeeded” (or failed, if that is the case) in the body of the e-mail and setup your other options in the same manner.
Outlook Rules are your friend, use them to be more productive. Enjoy!
Cooperation is Key
We have a morning “production control” meeting daily where key people report on the status of their systems as well as announcing approved change management items. Most days this is an exercise in repetition but it is necessary in order for administrators to announce changes to their systems that might affect other connected systems. For me, bringing down one of my SQL Servers can have a far out reaching effect upon many other systems.
For example, we have one particular server that houses all of the databases for our internal IT systems, such as VMWare Virtual Center and Citrix and a few smaller ones such as Blackberry Enterprise Server. This is a beefy server to power our infrastructure, however it is a major hassle every time I need to do some maintenance on it. Yes we have maintenance windows. However, for many of these systems the particular admin has to intervene before I can take their particular database offline. The usual cry is that “hey you cannot take that down on that day because I have X job running” where I say “no problem, how about tomorrow?” Then someone else chimes in with “no good, I have this process that runs on that day.”
My solution? Setup a meeting and coordinate the maintenance, which will happen come hell or high water. Cooperation is key. The database server must be patched and maintained, but without cooperation many other systems will suffer.
Enjoy!
SQL Cluster Failover Issues
Today’s topic is ‘oh crap, I manually failed over my SQL Server cluster during a lunch-time scheduled maintenance window and SQL Server and SQL Server Agent did not come back online.’ The key words in their being OH CRAP!
Looking at the ‘oh so informative cluster events’ I see the following:
The Cluster service failed to bring clustered service or application ‘SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)’ completely online or offline. One or more resources may be in a failed state. This may impact the availability of the clustered service or application.
That did not help, let’s move onto the Windows Event Viewer. It gave us: “The specified account’s password has expired.” Wait a minute! These are service accounts created by our active directory administrator that are supposed to never expire. Hmmm, I better investigate further. I look at a big group of my SQL Server service accounts and noticed about half of them are set this way. When I questioned the AD administrator, he indicated that he was training a new person and he must have done the half that was incorrect. Problem solved. Thus, it is a good idea to always check to make sure that your accounts are setup properly before you use them in SQL Server.
Enjoy!
Sunday Funday Returns
Sunday Funday has returned after our month-long series of questions and answers. In today’s installment of Sunday Funday, we bring you a great SQL song by Rob Lambert as we get ramped up for #SQLKaraoke at this year’s SQL PASS Summit. Enjoy!
Take Time for Yourself
Friday, we left the office early and headed an hour east to Orlando. The wife and I checked into the Bohemian Hotel Celebration right outside of the Walt Disney World property. The Bohemian is a beautiful hotel on the Celebration property, which is a planned community developed by Disney to have a quaint, small town feel with small shops and great scenery.
From there we headed to the Magic Kingdom for a night of wild rides and shopping. It was a great night for my wife and I capped off by a morning swim in the hotel pool. Little get-aways like this are great for your marriage as well as dealing with the day-to-day stress of life. We came home this afternoon refreshed and ready to enjoy the remainder of our weekend recharged for the next week. Do you take time for yourself? Enjoy!
I’m Going to the SQL PASS Summit!
For quite some time, I have hated November. Don’t get me wrong, I love Thanksgiving, let’s not get crazy there. But, to watch everyone get excited about going to the annual SQL PASS Summit was almost like being the only guy at the prom without a date. I never had that problem, but I can imagine it vividly thanks to having to sit out previous Summits because my employers did not see the benefit in flying me across the country.
It was quite painful to sit on the sidelines and see everyone enjoying #SQLKaraoke, seeing everyone meeting up with people that they had met on twitter in the #SQLFamily, and seeing bonds created and new friends made all in the name of SQL Server. I had a front row seat each time from my couch. A better analogy would be that of a professional football player at home watching other teams in the playoffs enjoying the sweet smell of success while he suffered the agony of the feet (or is that defeat). Thousand of SQL Server professionals were enjoying the learning, the training, and the networking while I had to simply watch from home. NO MORE! NOT THIS YEAR BABY! I GOT A DATE FOR THE PROM! I AM GOING TO THE SUMMIT! Look out Seattle, let the Big Gator Growl!
I am going to send many glorious tweets and facebook updates showing all of the new things I am learning, all of the new people I am meeting, and the friends I got to meet in real life. Also, let’s not forget the crazy songs I will sing at #SQLKaraoke, so when people talk to me throughout the year they will remember the good times we had that November when the planets aligned and I got to finally attend the SQL PASS Summit. Good times, good friends, and maybe I will get to see the unicorn. Is it time to go yet? Can I go now?
SQL Swampland 