SQL DBA Blog: Home

  • Get Last Database Restore Date and Time in SQL Server

    Knowing when a database was last restored is useful during incident response, audits, and general environment validation. This is not about backup schedules or restore progress.It is a simple historical check that answers one question: When was this database last restored? This post shows a reliable way to retrieve the most recent restore date and…

    read more

  • Script: Check Index Fragmentation Across All Databases

    Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Index fragmentation checks are usually written for one database at a time, which is fine until you inherit an instance with forty databases and no idea which of them has been skipping maintenance. Running a per-database script forty times is nobody’s idea of a health check. This script does the…

    read more

  • Deleting Rows in Batches in SQL Server

    Deleting large volumes of data from a SQL Server table looks simple, but it can cause real problems if done carelessly. A single large DELETE can: When you’re cleaning up historical data or running routine maintenance, deleting rows in batches is usually the safest and most predictable approach. This post shows a simple, production-safe pattern…

    read more

  • Script: I/O Usage by Database

    Part of the DBA-Tools Project. When a SQL Server is struggling and the usual suspects (CPU, memory, blocking) come back clean, the next question is always the same: which database is hammering the disks? On a busy instance hosting ten or twenty databases, gut feeling is not an answer. You need the actual read/write numbers,…

    read more

  • Script: Top Wait Statistics

    Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Every time a SQL Server session has to wait for something, a lock, a page from disk, a CPU slice, a memory grant, the engine records what it waited on and for how long. Those counters are the instance’s own diary of where time goes, and reading them is the…

    read more

  • RAND() vs NEWID() in SQL Server

    Most people searching for “random numbers in SQL Server” want one of two things: SQL Server gives you two common tools for this: RAND() and NEWID(). They solve different problems, and confusion usually starts when they are treated as interchangeable. This post shows how to use both, starting with simple examples, and explains why they…

    read more

  • Script: Check Worker Threads and Active Sessions

    Part of the DBA-Tools Project. There is a particular kind of SQL Server incident where the server is up, CPU looks fine, and yet new connections hang or time out. Applications report login failures, and even your own SSMS connection takes forever. The usual cause is worker thread starvation: SQL Server has run out of…

    read more

  • Get Database File Names and Paths in SQL Server

    As a DBA, you regularly need to know where your database files live, how big they are, and how they’re configured to grow. Capacity planning, migration prep, new environment review, disk space incidents: they all start here. This script gives you a full picture of every user database file on the instance: physical path, drive…

    read more

  • Script: Get SQL Server Agent Job Overview

    Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Most SQL Server instances end up with a handful of Agent jobs that quietly run backups, index maintenance, and monitoring collectors in the background. Nobody looks at them until something breaks, and by then it can be hard to tell whether a job has been failing for a day or…

    read more

  • Script: Get SQL Server Services Information

    Part of the DBA-Tools Project. A SQL Server instance is really a handful of Windows services working together, and it is surprisingly common for one of them to be quietly misconfigured. The SQL Server Agent service set to Manual startup instead of Automatic. A service still running under a personal domain account that leaves on…

    read more

Blog Categories

Latest Posts

Blog Tags

Always On Availability Groups (4) Auditing (7) Backups (5) Blocking Locking (6) Collectors (7) Database Backups & Recovery (8) Database Backups and Recovery (5) Database Maintenance (7) DBA Tools (24) Disk Space (5) Extended Events (8) Features (6) High Availability (6) Indexes (7) Installation (7) Instance (3) Inventory (6) Jobs (3) Maintenance (6) Migration (13) Monitoring (24) Performance (21) Performance Troubleshooting (9) PowerShell (4) Queries (3) Query Behaviour (5) Security (7) SQL Agent (5) SQL Scripts (17) SQL Server Administration (10) SQL Server Configuration (7) SQL Server Errors (5) SQL Server High Availability (4) SQL Server Internals (3) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) (6) SQL Server Monitoring (7) SQL Server Networking (9) SQL Server Security (7) Storage and Capacity (7) T-SQL (9) Temp DB (3) Tracing (7) Transaction Logs (4) Troubleshooting (14) Windows Server (4)