We've all been there, trying to figure out who's blocking who, who is the most avid blocker. Personally, I was and still am a huge fan of Adam Machanic's (b) sp_WhoIsActive for accomplishing that. But I stumbled upon a nice script from @SQL_Undercover (b|t) which is using sp_BlitzWho stored procedure. For the ones not familiar … Continue reading Collecting blocking chain
AWS RDS multi-az setup falsely reports multiple secondary partners
Hello again... I came across something weird recently while trying to understand some strange behaviors we seen on our RDS instances in AWS. Here's some background. We have 18 RDS instances in AWS (various sizes) spread across 3 environments: test, stage and production. All 18 of them are using multi-az and SQL 2017 Standard Edition. … Continue reading AWS RDS multi-az setup falsely reports multiple secondary partners
Change the PowerBI desktop default language
For whatever reason, I ended up with Romanian as the default language for PowerBI desktop (no regional settings, no browser settings, no nothing would provide a hint to the installer that it should install and set the app to Romanian). This did not help either: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/change-PowerBI-language-menus-to-english-while-maintaining/td-p/4782 I ended up in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\bin, … Continue reading Change the PowerBI desktop default language
Number of CPUs per NUMA node
A word of advice: the script assumes that you have the exact number of CPUs per NUMA node, WHICH MIGHT NOT BE THE CASE IN YOUR SCENARIO:
Remove TDE completely. Really?
I must be getting old, two blog posts in the same year! 🙂 Anyway, I made some additional testing as part of a TDE (Transparent Data Encryption, that is) implementation and I noticed couple of interesting things when you want to remove the TDE completely from the server: When checking sys.databases, tempdb is shown as … Continue reading Remove TDE completely. Really?
To OR or …?
Yeap, a year later, there we go, posting a quick blog again. A colleague of mine skyped me about a query that was running slow. Well, slow means that it ran for 90 seconds, and then it timed out, that is. Here is the little repro of the challenge: I know, I'm too lazy NOT … Continue reading To OR or …?
Why is important to separate data from indexes
Hello again. You all probably heard here and there that separating data from the indexes is good. Some of you even went down that road and actually did it. Which is good. There are also a ton of articles on this topic and the ones that come quickly to my mind are the ones authored … Continue reading Why is important to separate data from indexes
Reporting on AutoGrowth Events
We all know that autogrowth events are bad, for a lot of reasons. For starters, it increases the number of VLOGs for the transaction log. Second, depending on your settings, it may also slow down your server if these are often enough. Third, it means that you, as a DBA, missed something in the configuration … Continue reading Reporting on AutoGrowth Events
The joy of FILEGROUP_NAME (and probably other as well)
Part of my scripts collection, is a script that returns the details of a table: storage, metadata (sys.objects), partitioning, etc. I was using this script for quite a while and ran ok. Few days ago, however, after I disabled an index on a partitioned table it failed and the error was a bit puzzling: Msg … Continue reading The joy of FILEGROUP_NAME (and probably other as well)
Aggregation and partitioned tables
One of my main tasks is to keep a close eye on performance. Every time we have a major release, I have to start looking at performance, find main culprits and fix them. Well, not me, but work with developers and find a solution to the issues at hand. And our databases are rather large, … Continue reading Aggregation and partitioned tables
SQL-PLAY 