TL;DR summary: Don’t do it. Stop reading here if you want, but just don’t do it. This post refers to shrinking your database files (mdf, or ndf files), not shrinking the log file. The log file is a completely different conversation, however shrink database does shrink the log file. Not shrinking your database is one of the more counter intuitive …

DBCC ShrinkDatabase – I want to shrink my database. Read more »

I have been doing work with multiple clients using the GE Centricity EMR product which makes extensive use of Microsoft SQL Server. The performance issues that you run into with Centricity are very similar to what I see working with other clients on a daily basis. Centricity is a solid product, when you run into performance issues, they can often …

GE Centricity EMR Performance Tuning. Read more »

Reliable DBA Services is one of the things I talk about on my business website at http://StedmanSolutions.com, but that can mean many things to different people. To me this has many meanings. Today the reliability of having RAID10 on my home office computer saved the day.   Drive Failure Last Year A year ago not long after starting working at …

RAID10 Saved The Day Read more »

Today marks the end of life of SQL Server 2005, originally release in November of 2005, this product has finally come to its end of life point. One of my favorite features that was introduced in SQL Server 2005 was Common Table Expressions. Another big item that was added to SQL Server 2005 was the SQL Server Management Studio. Its …

SQL Server 2005 End of Life – End of Support Today Read more »

One of my favorite queries this week is the following query that creates a text based bar chart to quickly help visualize the VLF files on any database log file. In the last month I have given the “TempDB Do This and Don’t Do That” presentation twice, once at the Bellingham SQL Server users group, and another time at SQL …

Visualizing Log File VLF Sizing Read more »

The TL;DR summary: Life is good, business is good, and I am loving it. Ready to roll with Year 2 of Stedman Solutions, LLC. The Details It has been an interesting year.  I officially formed the business about 3 years ago, but never worked at it regularly until April 1, 2015. Prior to April 1, 2015 had a full time …

A year in review – The first year of Stedman Solutions, LLC. Read more »

It can be a bit time consuming to work through the the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) user interface to check on the agent job history to find specific agent jobs that have been run. To help speed that process up, I created the following TSQL script to directly query the job history. This query makes use of a common table …

TSQL Script to Display Agent Job History Read more »

Back in 2012 when I was writing my Common Table Expressions book, I came up with the following CTE in a function to split a string into rows. Original Post: http://stevestedman.com/2012/04/using-a-cte-to-split-a-string-into-rows/ At the time, I thought it was pretty handy function, I ended up including it as an example in my CTE book, and I have used it dozens of …

CTE to Split a String in a function SplitString Read more »

The check for excessive sysmaintplan_logdetail has be added to the Database Health Monitor – Quick Scan Report. If you haven’t had a maintenance plan to clean up maintenance plan history, it can grow excessively over time. I recently worked on a SQL Server that had 6 years worth of maintenance plan history, and the msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_logdetail table was approaching nearly 1gb in …

SQL Server – sysmaintplan_logdetail Read more »