Tag: SQL Server Administration
-
Troubleshooting Database Mirroring Issues in SQL Server
Database Mirroring is deprecated, but you will still see it in many production environments. It was officially marked deprecated in SQL Server 2012 and has remained in that state for well over a decade. In my own career as a DBA, it has been “deprecated” the entire time, yet still widely deployed and fully supported.…
Written by
-
Get Current Date & Time in SQL Server
Getting the current date and time in SQL Server is straightforward. Choosing the correct function for your workload is what matters. Whether you’re stamping audit rows, logging ETL runs, or investigating production issues, SQL Server exposes several built-in functions with different precision and return types. All of these functions use the Windows OS clock of…
Written by
-
Grant VIEW SERVER STATE in SQL Server
🚨Part of the SQL Server Errors series, the exact messages and what actually causes them.In: Security Msg 300 · Level 14 · State 1 VIEW SERVER STATE permission was denied on object ‘server’, database ‘master’. Msg 297, Level 16, State 1 The user does not have permission to perform this action. ⚡GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE…
Written by
-
How to Right-Size SQL Server Database Files
Auto-growth is not the problem. Unplanned, reactive growth is. When a file is undersized SQL Server extends it repeatedly under load, every extension is a pause, and if those pauses land in the peak hour they show up as latency, I/O pressure and the occasional application timeout. Right-sizing is about making growth rare, predictable and…
Written by
-
SQL Server: ALTER DATABASE SET ENABLE_BROKER Taking a Long Time (Fix)
After a recent Availability Group failover, Database Mail stopped sending emails. On investigation, the underlying cause was Service Broker not being enabled on msdb, the system database Database Mail runs out of. Enabling it should be instant. Instead the statement sat there, and this is what it was waiting on. To confirm the status, I…
Written by
-
SQL Server: Ad hoc Update to System Catalogs is Not Supported (Fix)
While enabling show advanced options using sp_configure, I encountered an unexpected failure when executing RECONFIGURE: The change would not apply, and any further configuration attempts failed in the same way. This issue typically appears on systems where older configuration settings have been modified and never reset. In most cases, the root cause is the legacy…
Written by
-
How to Kill a SPID in SQL Server
In SQL Server, every connection to the database engine is assigned a Session Process ID, commonly known as a SPID. There are situations where you may need to kill a SPID in SQL Server. This typically occurs when a session is blocking other queries, running indefinitely, holding locks during maintenance, or preventing a database from…
Written by
-
How to Check Blocking SPIDs in SQL Server
Blocking is one of the most common causes of performance issues in SQL Server. When one session holds a lock on a resource and another session needs that same resource, the second session waits. If that wait persists, users experience slowness. Understanding how to quickly identify blocking SPIDs is a core DBA skill. This guide…
Written by
-
How to Check SQL Server Version
Knowing exactly which SQL Server version and build is running is foundational DBA work. It comes up during patching, incident response, audits, upgrades, and when engaging Microsoft support. SQL Server exposes version information in several ways. Some are fast and visual, others are scriptable, and a few provide deeper installation detail when you need it.…
Written by
-
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…
Written by
- SQL Injection in Dynamic SQL: Use sp_executesql
- RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE When SQL Server Is Nowhere Near Its Memory Cap
- Dynamic Data Masking: What a WHERE Clause Still Reveals
- DBA Scripts: Get Log Shipping Status
- SQL Server Row-Level Security: The Filter Does Not Stop Cross-Tenant Writes
- View the Definition of a Stored Procedure in SQL Server
- Backups & Recovery (17)
- DBA Scripts (152)
- High Availability (HA) (13)
- Installation & Configuration (49)
- Maintenance (25)
- Migration & Upgrades (14)
- Monitoring (9)
- Performance Tuning (37)
- Security (Encryption & Permissions) (22)
- Storage & Capacity (16)
- T-SQL Fundamentals (15)
- Troubleshooting (95)
- Wait Types (235)