SQL DBA Blog: Home

  • DBA Scripts: Get Orphaned Users

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Security The Login Exists, the Database Still Says No An account that worked last week stops working against one database. The password is right, the login is there in Object Explorer, the user is still in the database with its roles intact, and…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get Database Backup History

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Backup & Recovery Most backup checks answer one question: what’s the latest backup. That’s the right question most of the time, but it hides everything that happened before it. A backup job that ran reliably for a year and then quietly changed behaviour…

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  • When Shrinking Temp DB Just Won’t Shrink

    This is broken. You run DBCC SHRINKFILE on the Temp DB data files, maybe throw in a CHECKPOINT for good measure, and nothing moves. The files sit there stubbornly taking up space you need back. I am not in the habit of shrinking databases. It fragments files and usually just creates more work later. But…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get Recent Error Log Entries

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Performance & Troubleshooting The SQL Server error log records almost everything worth knowing about an instance’s recent health, and almost nobody reads it until they’re already troubleshooting something. It’s not that the information isn’t there, it’s that xp_readerrorlog returns thousands of lines dominated…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get Backup Restore Progress

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Backup & Recovery A large restore has been running for 20 minutes. Is it about to finish, or is it barely a quarter done? SSMS won’t tell you unless you started it interactively and left that session open, and a restore kicked off…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get Backup Encryption Status

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Backup & Recovery TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) and backup encryption are two different things that get confused constantly. TDE encrypts the data and log files at rest, and a backup of a TDE database is encrypted too, with the same database encryption key…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get Backup Chain Integrity

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Backup & Recovery You can have a full backup from last night and still not be able to restore to 2pm today. That’s the gap this script closes. Backup coverage checks tell you when your last backups ran. They don’t tell you whether…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get Backup Restore Duration Estimate

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Backup & Recovery This script is for planning, before a backup or restore starts: how long should you allow, from your own throughput history. If one is running right now and the question is how much longer it has, you want Get Backup…

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  • DBA Scripts: Remove XE Session

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Performance & Troubleshooting › Extended Events & Tracing An Extended Events session you stood up for a decommission audit, a login trace, or a stored procedure profile isn’t meant to run forever. Once you’ve got the evidence, it’s just overhead, disk space, buffer…

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  • DBA Scripts: Get XE Session Activity

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Performance & Troubleshooting › Extended Events & Tracing Standing up a trace session is the easy part. The actual decision, is this database safe to decommission, is that service account still connecting from the right host, comes from reading the results back and…

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