If you’re still using super old versions of SQL Server and don’t have access to awesome XEvents, we’ve got some commands to help simplify trace management.
Before I Begin Just a quick note, if you use newer versions of SQL Server and haven’t seen the XEvents Profiler in SSMS 17, it’s awesome! In my experience, it’s much faster than using Profiler and just as useful.
Sadly, however, it’s only available for SQL Server version 2012 and up.
Congrats to our teammate Rob Sewell! Rob was invited by PASS to present about PowerShell at PASS Summit 2018 on Tuesday, November 6 2018.
In his day-long session, Rob will talk about a variety of super interesting subjects including: dbachecks, PowerShell module-making, GitHub, VSTS, and dbatools. Rob is a vibrant, knowledgeable speaker and I can’t recommend this precon enough! I learn a ton every time that Rob and I present together.
Azure Data Studio (formerly SQL Server Operations Studio) by Microsoft is like SSMS for ops, all open source and published on GitHub! They updated their wiki’s Performance page, addressing why SQL Operations Studio starts up slowly. Their startup stats are pretty cool!
This screenshot reminded me that I should write about our own import time stats.
Confession You may remember years ago when I expressed how upset I was about SQLPS, SqlServer’s predecessor, taking so long to import.
Years ago, I wrote Watch-DbaDbLogin which keeps an inventory of accounts, hosts and programs that log into a SQL Server. It was pretty crude, but helped immensely during my migration, as this inventory ensured that my documentation was in order and no unexpected downtime would occur.
I found that about 80-90% of logins/applications were covered within 48-hours, but two months of data gave me total confidence.
I always wanted to update the command, though I’m not sure Watch-DbaDbLogin is still within the scope of the module.
Last week I performed a server migration from SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2016 using dbatools. A lot of work is done up front to prepare and plan for these migrations to have the least impact on our customers. So I always do my best to improve the process each time we do it.
Backstory This is the second product server we have migrated to SQL 2016. The first migration had automation to a certain point.
Back around the time we did SQL Bits, Rob Sewell spoke to Richard Campbell at RunAs Radio.
The show, Managing SQL Server using dbatools with Rob Sewell, is a fun and fantastic listen. Not only does Rob talk at length about the migration capabilities in dbatools, but also other cool things like CI/CD, containers and more. Check it out!
Happy Belated World Backup Day! I wish it was Backup and Restore Day, Test Your Backups Day, or World Recoverability Day, but alas.
I’m currently working on my portion of the effort to get dbatools to 1.0 - integration tests for our commands. And while I wait for AppVeyor to run all of our tests, I’ve got a few minutes to post.
Initially, I wanted to highlight our Backup/Restore commands but there are sooo many, it’d take a few days to write about them.
Nearly every time I inherit a SQL Server environment, I’m only given a partial list of SQL Servers that exist on the network. It’s my usual routine to get permission to sniff the network then run about five different programs including Idera’s SQL Discovery and Microsoft’s Assessment and Planning Toolkit.
I always thought it’d be cool to have one comprehensive PowerShell command that could do the work of all the above and was ecstatic to see NetSPI’s Scott Sutherland had written a few commands to do just that in his awesome PowerShell module PowerUpSQL.
I’ve been working on a project this year to upgrade SQL Server versions for around 80 application databases, with most of the upgrades requiring both SQL Server and Windows Server upgrades to get to the future state we were looking for. The general process for each of these was to build a new virtual machine with the upgraded operating system, install the desired SQL Server version and then migrate the application databases during an arranged downtime window.
An Issue Defined In software development, an “issue” can be anything from you hit an error running an application or you get an unexpected result from an operation. You can also say an issue is a spelling error in our documentation. Our goal is to fix any “issue” whether it is a bug, an unexpected error (especially these) or considering a feature you think is missing from the module.
However, before we can fix it…you have to let us know.
dbatools