It's an odd truth that laziness leads to better systems administration. That is, so long as it spurs you to automate and thoroughly document a repetitive or tedious task. For instance, I was recently tasked with reducing the excessive size of some system tables in our Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment. To start with, I accomplished... Continue Reading →
Scripting Failovers for SQL Server Maintenance
As much as we'd all like to set up our SQL instances and never again let anyone touch them, that's just not possible in real life. We live in a world where entities, for good or for evil, are constantly exposing vulnerabilities both in the SQL software and Windows itself. For that reason it is... Continue Reading →
Is Optimizing for AdHoc Queries Worth It?
As you probably know, there is a server configuration option called "optimize for ad hoc workloads". For more details on that option check out the MSDN article. The real question is, how do I know the extent to which my environment uses AdHoc queries? Well, as usual there is a DMV for that. Use the... Continue Reading →
Managing CDC Jobs on an Availability Group
So, here's the deal. You've got Change Data Capture going in your environment and want to move your database to an Availability Group on SQL Server 2012. That's great, lots of advantages there. But what happens to CDC when your database fails over to a different node? Since the capture process runs through SQL Agent... Continue Reading →