SQL DBA Blog: Home

  • DBA Scripts: Get Wait Statistics

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Performance & Troubleshooting 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…

    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

  • DBA Scripts: Get Worker Threads and Active Sessions

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Performance & Troubleshooting › Query & Performance Tuning 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…

    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

  • DBA Scripts: Get SQL Agent Job Overview

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Maintenance & Automation › SQL Agent & Jobs 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…

    Read More

  • DBA Scripts: Get Services Information

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Server & Configuration › Server Inventory 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…

    Read More

  • How to Increase Maximum Characters Displayed in SSMS

    🛠️Part of the SSMS Complete Guide, installing, configuring and fixing SQL Server Management Studio. By default, SQL Server Management Studio limits the number of characters displayed per column when using Results to Text. The default limit is 256 characters. If a query or system stored procedure returns more than that, the output is silently truncated.…

    Read More

  • Applying Data Retention Safely in SQL Server

    Data retention in SQL Server usually means deleting old data in a controlled and repeatable way. That might be driven by compliance requirements, table growth that’s starting to hurt performance, SQL Server Express size limits, or simply keeping log and audit tables under control. Whether this is a one-off cleanup or a permanent maintenance task,…

    Read More

  • DBA Scripts: Get Backup Coverage

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Backup & Recovery Most production SQL Server environments have backup jobs configured. The question that actually matters is whether those jobs are running, and succeeding, for every database that needs them. A database added last month might never have been folded into the…

    Read More

  • DBA Scripts: Get Instance Configuration Snapshot

    🔧Part of the DBA-Tools Project, copy/paste SQL Server scripts and health checks.In: Server & Configuration › Server Inventory Every sp_configure setting on an instance tells a small story: a value someone changed deliberately, a value nobody’s touched since install, or a value that’s been changed but is still waiting for a restart to actually take…

    Read More

Start Here

The Pillars

Blog Categories

Latest Posts

Blog Tags

Access (4) Always On Availability Groups (4) Auditing (7) Backups (6) Blocking (4) Blocking Locking (6) Collectors (7) Database Backups & Recovery (8) Database Backups and Recovery (5) Database Maintenance (7) DBA Tools (24) Disk Space (5) Error Log (3) Extended Events (8) Features (6) High Availability (6) Indexes (7) Installation (7) Inventory (8) Maintenance (6) Migration (14) Monitoring (27) Performance (21) Performance Troubleshooting (9) PowerShell (4) Query Behaviour (5) Security (10) 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 (10) Temp DB (3) Tracing (7) Transaction Logs (4) Troubleshooting (24) Windows Server (4)