Database Owner? What user owns your database?
Who owns that database? A quick check of the owner of most databases will likely reveal that the databases are either owned by sa, or… Read More »Database Owner? What user owns your database?
May 2016
Drop a trigger after a specific date
The question of how to delete a trigger after a specific date came up. Here is what could be done. If you want to… Read More »Drop a trigger after a specific date
How Many VLFs is Too Many?
Here is an error that popped up in the SQL Server error log today:
5/6/2016 10:10:10 AM spid22s Database [DatabaseName] has more than 10000 virtual log files which is excessive. Too many virtual log files can cause long startup and backup times. Consider shrinking the log and using a different growth increment to reduce the number of virtual log files.
Virtual Log Files (VLFs) are part of the SQL Server log file. When space is allocated in the log due to growth, that new chunk of log is broken up into Virtual Log Files
After looking further into this server, the VLF count turned out to be around 163,000. That is certainly the highest VLF that I have ever seen.
My personal threshold for too many VLFs is usually around 200 with my preference to be less than 100 VLF files. Others may have their preferences, they will all be far less than 10,000, and certainly less than the 163,000 that I had the opportunity to see today.
Updating SQL Server Statistics
Updating SQL Server statistics may not be as obvious as it may sound.
I
magine this scenario. I invite you over for dinner and a game of Scrabble. After dinner, I start to do the dishes, while you set up the game. Rather than just doing the dishes that are dirty from our dinner, I decide to take all the dishes from the shelves, and drawers in my kitchen. I create a gigantic pile of all of the dishes, both clean and dirty on the kitchen counter. You get the game setup, and we start playing the game. Between turns, I jump back into the kitchen, and wash a few dishes, then on my turn, I jump back into the game and play my turn, then back to the kitchen again. During the game you are constantly waiting for me to jump back into the game to make my move. You could see how long this would draw out the game with me washing all the dishes, even the ones that were already clean. 4 hours later, I finally finish the dishes, and shortly thereafter we finish the game. It is unlikely, even if you love to play Scrabble that you would ever return to my house for dinner and a game again. Tomorrow night, when I have dinner with my family, I do the same thing, and every night after dinner I wash all the dishes in the kitchen, even the clean ones. You can see how wasteful this sounds, and perhaps some people would even label me as OCD or something worse in this scenario.
Although this is obviously the wrong way to do things, often times we end up doing the equivalent of this in our SQL Server maintenance tasks.
Is enabling xp_cmdshell a security risk?
After listening to an interview of Sean McCown (twitter) and some lively discussion on xp_cmdshell, I decided it would be a worthy enough discussion to create a blog post. At a minimum it might stir up some opinions.
There are many varying opinions out there, including some really good opinions that applied to SQL Server 2000, but don’t really apply any more.