I found an interesting website today caled SQL Share. It has video tutorials from community leaders such as Andy Warren, Brian Knight, Kathi Kallenberger, to name but a few.
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Today a colleague kicked off a trace and went to a meeting. After a while, we noticed some performance issues. After looking at the processes running, I could see a trace was running. I had two options. I could kill the spid or I could stop the trace.
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Up until a few years ago, I’ll admit to having never been bitten by the parameter sniffing performance issue and if I am honest, I had not even heard of it. I got bitten by this yesterday
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I stumbled across a really cool website today. I’d never come across it in Google searches, so I figured I’d mention it on here so any readers can bookmark it straight away!
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Quick! Call the DBA – The database is completely messed up and not responding! Does this sound familiar?
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Well 2010 was an interesting year. My company has been extremely busy developing the next generation of our software. The development covers both client and server side databases. Plenty to keep me and my team busy!
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Just a useful tip which caused me a few moments of despair today. If you are using SQL Server 2005 and you save a profiler trace to a trace table, the data is stored in microseconds. If you want to turn this into seconds, divide Duration by 1000000.0. I place the .0 on the end to ensure I get decimal values, although you can cast this if you want a tidier looking result set!
I got caught out by this one today. I had a trace running with a whole bunch of events selected.
The trace was running and pulling back both Deadlock and Deadlock Chain but no graph. Extremely puzzling. I created a new trace just three events selected; Deadlock graph, Locks:Deadlock & Locks:Deadlock Chain. However, I inadvertently forgot to add a filter on the DatabaseID and we had the Deadlock Graph back in play. It was only when I added in more events and decided I needed to restrict my trace data to a specific database did I realise it was the DatabaseId filter causing the issue.
So, if you want to see the Deadlock Graphs, lose the filter on the database id.
Just remember that if you do remove the database id filter and this is a multi database (and busy) server, you could get a lot of trace data returned during the trace period.
Something I generally forget the syntax for each time we build a new server and have to search my SQL scripts for it…Now it’s on my blog, even I can look it up quickly!
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I’ve seen a number of posts over the years asking what skills and requirements are needed to become a DBA. It’s an interesting question. From experience, I find a lot of people seem to fall into the DBA role from a development role. Not all DBA’s have gone this route, but it seems a good percentage have done so. I’m from a development background.
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