Tag: Features

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Two Messaging Systems That Run Quietly Until They Don’t Service Broker and Database Mail are both messaging infrastructure, and both are easy to forget are even active, since SQL Server uses Service Broker internally for things like Availability Group health checks, and Database Mail just sits there until something needs…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Two Things That Break Silently at Migration or Decommission Time Two checks that rarely matter until the exact moment they do: does this database’s collation match the server’s (and every other database it might join against), and does anything in this database reach into another database or another server by…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Where Compression Actually Pays Off Row and page compression trade CPU for storage and I/O, and that trade is worth making on some tables and not others. The biggest, least-frequently-updated tables are usually the best candidates: maximum space and I/O savings, minimal CPU cost relative to the table’s overall activity.…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Two Features, Same Risk: They Both Grow the Transaction Log Change Data Capture and Change Tracking answer a similar question, “what changed and when,” for two different audiences, ETL/replication consumers for CDC, application-level conflict detection for Change Tracking. They’re unrelated under the hood, but they share the exact same operational…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. What’s Actually Running on a Server You Just Inherited Extended Events sessions are easy to lose track of. Someone sets one up to chase a specific problem, the problem gets fixed, and the session keeps running quietly forever. On a server you’ve just inherited, you have no idea what’s active,…