This is going to be a bit of a quick post but one about something that I see coming up time and time again on SQL Undercover's search terms. How do I find an availability group's primary server? A while back, Adrian put together a bunch of queries for Always On Availability Groups, 7 ways... Continue Reading →
If you're running availability groups it may seem like a great idea to offload your read only reporting workloads to a secondary. There are a couple of ways that you could do that, you could use read only routing or simply just point those reports directly at a read only secondary (read only routing is... Continue Reading →
The first of our new series of new look podcasts, David has a look at intent locks in SQL Server and what the purpose of them is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44vNrHJR984
Here's a quick one for you, have you ever spent all day working on some query or another only for SSMS to crash or for you to accidentally close the tab that you're working on without saving the query? I'm sure you have, we all have. What happens next is usually a muttering of some... Continue Reading →
This month's T-SQL Tuesday invitation comes from Kevin Chant and he's asking us about a fantasy feature that we'd love to see in SQL Server. I had a little think about this and there's one thing that came straight to my mind, it is something that's possible with third party tools but isn't something supported... Continue Reading →
This is going to be a quick post but this morning I was asked the question, 'how can I get the name of all the database snapshots on a SQL Server?'. It was an interesting question so I thought I'd share a quick script to do just that. We're going to need to tap into... Continue Reading →
Intent locks, one of those things in SQL Server that seem to be very often misunderstood. They're something that I've found myself explaining time and time again, I've even been on calls with customer DBAs who don't fully understand why they're there and what they're doing. So what exactly is an intent lock and why... Continue Reading →
I recently hit this rather interesting issue when migrating a bunch of SQL Servers onto a nice, shiny new SAN. The plan was simple enough, take the secondary servers in the four node cluster, migrate those over to the new SAN provided to me by the lovely storage guys. Once they were done, fail the... Continue Reading →
We love xp_fixeddrives here, it's a quick and simple way to see how much space you've got available on your drives. But there are just a couple of things that I really wish it would do better. Firstly, I'd love to see the total size of the drive and possibly even a percentage of free... Continue Reading →
