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Monday, March 23, 2015

Today we will start introducing a series of posts that talk about an interesting and crucial topic in SQL Server operations which is “the daily operational tasks”.

Your daily operational tasks simply represent your first line defense against all threats you may fear of as a DBA and also keep doing it on daily basis is considered as a kind of proactive support to your data platform.

That is why you need to start your day by going through these tasks and in order to unify this process, you simply need to design a “checklist”.

Before we start designing this checklist, we have first to define what items should be included in this list or in a different word, what are the parts inside your data platform that need to be checked on daily basis?

In all environments I worked in, I used to check the following sections on daily basis:
  1. SQL Server servers disk free space.
  2. SQL Server services status.
  3. SQL Server server’s windows event viewer errors & Warnings.
  4. SQL Server cluster status.
  5. SQL Server logs errors and warnings.
  6. SQL Server Databases Backup status (system/user DBs)
  7. SQL Server Agent jobs status.

Also one of the best practices is to record your daily checks result in a spreadsheet like excel file in order to keep track with your day-to-day operational issues.

Below is a snapshot of the daily check list sample sheet.
















Next Step:
In the next post we will check together the different ways to collect such information in order to be able to do your daily task with both speed and efficiency.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

In the previous post "Making Your Own Alerts (Part 1)" we talked about how to create a customized alert for any event inside SQL Server beside the default alerting feature in SQL DB engine, today will make a simple example for this and our target will be sending alerts via email in case of locking cases occur in our databases.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Alerting is a critical and essential feature for any IT system especially database management systems, and that is why “SQL Alerts” was an essential part of SQL Server Agent since earlier versions of SQL Server.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Collations is a critical and interesting topic at the same time, collations simply refers to the behavior of SQL Server for sorting and comparing character data, which is sorted using rules that define the correct character sequence, case-sensitivity, accent marks, ..etc
In the previous post we got the server logins associated with its server level permissions, this is a good step but by default it is not enough, because most of the time we will have some logins that have permissions on the database level not on the whole instance one.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Case:
Imagine the situation of a user who is trying to insert his\her information into a website and after clicking the submit button they wait 3 minutes to get the operation completed, one of the reasons for this bad situation can be a waiting “locking” case, the insert statement is being locked by another statement that locked the targeted table.