This month’s T-SQL
Tuesday #62, the first of 2015, hosted by yours truly, (invitation
to Healthy SQL here), asked that you all blog about your T-SQL Resolution,
and describe what it is that you will do this year to make sure your SQL
Servers are healthy provide some technical tips on things a DBA should do to
keep your SQL Servers performing optimally.
As we know, SQL Server Performance is key to a healthy SQL Server
environment, and can be achieved by doing regular health checks.
There are other things to do to make sure your
SQL Servers are healthy and protected, like ensuring daily backups, setting up
monitoring, schedule regular index maintenance such as rebuild or reorganize,
or even as simple as applying the latest service packs and cumulative
updates. My fellow SQL peeps and bloggers
came up with some great Healthy SQL T-SQL Tuesday tips, and glad they shared
them with us here. So, we're still in January 2015, as of this T-SQL Tuesday wrap-up below:
Rob Farley (b|t) was the first entry, from the
Lobster Pot Land Down Under, who talked about not just SQL Server Monitoring,
but the need
to monitor your APS/PDW implementation that you can read about by clicking
on the hyperlink above.
talked about his goal for making his SQL environments
healthier is to at least help his SQL teammates from the support team to set up
a process of capturing baseline information.
I discussed this a lot and establishing a baseline is one of the most important elements for Healthy SQL. See Boris’
entry about baselines and more.
Steve Thompson preaches to my choir,
of the need for SQL Server Health checks, and provides us a nice checklist and
some useful tools to use in your daily DBA day. Steve discusses two main
components to this topic:- Review of existing SQL Server implementations-
Developing on-going monitoring to detect small issues before they become large
ones (think alerting) and gives us a very good start with his T-SQL
Tuesday blog.
All the recovery plans and service
level agreements do you no good if there is nothing to recover, which is why
James built a little PowerShell script that lets us know if backups have not
occurred. Check James’ blog out here
a Healthy SQL environment – restores!
Yes, having a good database backup corruption free is one thing, but
making sure you can restore it is guaranteeing database integrity, and DBA job
survival. Chris shows us how
to automate our SQL Server database restores:
Speaking of database integrity and the
need to verify the structure of our databases, Kenneth Fisher (b|t) writes about PAGE_VERIFY,
and the available options. He gives us a
lesson in SQLStudies why
to page verify here.
Drilling further down into the internals of a database, Mickey Stuewe (b|t), instructs us that Primary Key Constraints Are Good For Your Database,
and indeed they are, and she tells us why in her T-SQL ponderings entitled the same.
Chris Shaw (b|t), gives us a bunch of T-SQL Tuesday
Healthy SQL Tips, and the first one, by far is what he considers the most important
- Backups. So, you see, we all
agree! The next tips he gives, basically
are all about Bacups & Restores, because, well, they’re the most important
DBA tasks! Remember, to Check
those Backups!
Steve Jones (b|t), of SQLServerCentral.com, gives us even
more great tips on making sure your SQL Server are healthy! So, do we prefer to be sick or healthy? Steve
highlights some essential elements, yes; backups are one of them, of a Healthy
SQL environment. For all of them, go to his entry up on VoiceOfTheDBA
blog.
Jason Brimhall (b|t) talks about symptoms, Minor
Ailments and Healthy SQL, and tells us about his experience and some pain
points in SQL Server, with his blog post, highlighted above.
Oh, almost forgot my own entry on the PearlKnows blog, me,
Robert Pearl (b |
t), where I talk about Achieving
Healthy SQL with Management Data Warehouse (MDW), a native out-of-the-box feature, which you
can easily deploy collect DMV stats, and report on the health of multiple SQL
instances (versions >=2008). MDW uses
it’s trusty collection agent the data collector.
Finally,
better late than never, but hey, can’t we make an exception for royalty? Andrea
Allred, aka RoyalSQL,
decrees what we need to do when our transaction logs are over-sized,
and provides us with a neat monitoring script, “large log file alert”. Indeed,
managing the growth of t-logs are a royal pain. Glad Andrea is able to help us out!
Well, this January 2015 T-SQL Tuesday is
a wrap! Many thanks for everyone
mentioned here for their excellent contributions and participation in T-SQL
Tuesday#62, Healthy SQL! Also, thanks again
to Adam Machanic (b|t) for allowing me to host this
continuing blog party. If you’re interested in doing the same, drop Adam a note
to get on the list.
[You can follow me on twitter: @Pearlknows]
