The Multifunctioning DBA » MS SQL

Database Virtulization

Colin Smith — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:45:39 +0000

Some of you may see the name of this post and think that I am going to talk about running SQL Server on VMWare or HyperV. Well that is sort of correct but not really. I am involved in the very early beta testing of a new product that will let you provision VDB’s. I am not going to mention names just yet but so far the product is very nice. No GUI yet so I have to interact and do pretty much everything via the command line. But, let me share this with you.

I picked a database that is about 180Gigs, not very big, as my virtualizaton candidate. After doing the pre-work that is needed I was able to provision my VDB to a SQL Server. If you look at it on SQL Server you will see that the database is 180Gigs and you are able to do anything, so far, that you would with a real database. I am also running all this on VMWare guests. So now if you look at the size of the VDB via the virtualization stack, you see that the database is only about 3MB. That is a very big savings. Now that comes with one pretty big caveate, but it is worth it. You do have to have a separate SQL Server instance running where the virtualization software is housing a compressed copy of the database that is in a restoring state at all times. This is what the VDB is actually provisioned from. So how big is that database, well I am getting about 3:1 compression ratio, so that restoring copy that is the VDB source is about 40GB. So 180 to just over 40GB and now I have a second copy of that database. Now the really cool thing, Say I need a third copy or more, well all of those can be taken off the same source and they actually only take a few MB to start. That is a huge savings on disk. Think about if I was working with a database that was 1T or more.

Now another really great thing about this, to provision the VDB, it takes a couple minutes. So even for my 180Gig database, for me to do a restore to another instance for developers, I am talking over an hour, now that is literally less than 5 minutes, after the initial backup of the actual source is taken and compressed and presented as a restoring database. But that is a one time process and now I can provision as many VDB’s as I want and it will only take me about 5 minutes or less per copy that I need. Plus I am only going to be taking up Megabytes and not Gigabytes or Terra bytes. The possibilities of this are just awesome.

There is a lot more to talk about around this and I am just scratching the surface here. But keep an eye out as I will be posting more and more about this as I do more testing with the product. I am working with this companies engineers and providing feedback on features that would be nice to have as well as letting them know about bugs that I run into.

First SQL Servers User Group Meeting

Colin Smith — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:30:47 +0000

Last night I attended my first SQL Servers Users Group here in Phoenix. I a so happy that we have one. It was a good meeting, I arrived and apperantly the speaker that was supposed to present was sick and could not make it. Luckily for us, the meetings are help at the MS offices here, and a MS employee was nice enough to volunteer and do a presentation on SQL Server 08 R2 Report Builder 3.0. Lots of great information. Not really anything that I use in my daily job but still good to know and wow, I had kow idea you could do so much. PowerPivot sounds pretty awsome and I think that users are going t love being able to pull data from multiple sources and create relationships and then pivot that data. I think MS really is trying to make the end user experiance better and kudos to them for that. I am not sure, if as a DBA, that is making my job easier, but I am not employed to do easy work.

More fun with MS SQL Server

Colin Smith — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:00:54 +0000

I have a customer who would like to have a couple things. They would like to have, above all, HA. Secondly they would like to be able to configure the application to write to one database and read from another. They want to do this to boost performance as they feel that IO may be an issue. I suggested to them that we do and Active – Active Cluster and in one instance we will have the full writeable database, and in the other instance we will have a copy of the database that is maintained by using transactional replication. This should give them exactly what they are looking for. I am excited that the customer also likes this solution and would like to get going on it ASAP. We do have some things to consider here before we can start. One big thing is that they do not really want any downtime, SHOCKER, while setting this up but the live database is currently sitting on one of the servers that will need to be a part of the cluster. I am hoping that we can move the database temporarily, do all the re-architecturing that is needed and then move the database back to the cluster. Once I get that done then I will be able to set up the replication.

I will post more about this project and how I get it done as I actually get to do it.

PASS Summit

Colin Smith — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:34:22 +0000

I am trying to get my company to pay for me to attend the PASS Summit 2010 in Seattle Washington. I am still pretty new in the world of Databases but I think that attending the Summit would be very good for me. First I might get to meet some of the people that I read daily and respect so much. That would be really cool, but I think more importantly than that is getting to know people like me that have their hands in the trenches everyday. I would love to hear the horror stories about Database Corruption and how they recovered, or perhaps a Disaster and recovery. I prepare for DR all the time but have never, knocking on wood, had to go through one. Listening to real problems and how to deal with them is what I am most interested in. Especially performance, I have not really been able to get to deep into performance tuning but man I want to. I think that the presentations at the Summit will be invaluable to me as well.

I just sent my boss a breakdown of the cost to send me and it was just over $2500.00. That is a lot but not really when you think about it. I am pretty much the only SQL Guy at the company and I am still new but I have identified over 140 instances of SQL Server running in the company. I am still attempting to make sense of all of them and get my basic health check script working on them all. But I have to say, with that many instances and all that data, I think it would be a good investment to send me to get more knowledge and meet people that have more knowledge than I do. I have my fingers crossed and I hope that I will see you there.

Lots of Work to be done

Colin Smith — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:33:02 +0000

A few months ago I was transferred to my companies parent company. I think that this is good news for me so I am happy about it now. I have been asking, for about a month, to do a network scan in order to identify servers that have SQL installed. Due to the holidays and scheduling I did not get this right away. I just got a list today and so I wanted to get going and see what I have to deal with. First of all I have 142 servers that have been identified on the scanned networks, more to come, that I have to start looking into. I have a script that will go out and get some basic information about each instance as long as I have an instance name. I do not, I only have the host name of the servers. That is OK though as I think most are default instances. Anyway, I started my script and away it went. It scanned about 5 servers before running into one that is not a default instance. Because of this I will write another script tomorrow to go get all the instance names. I will try to post that script as well. Before it stopped though, I found one server with 117 Databases on it. WOW. It is also running SQL Server 2000. I am not really happy about that. Also, I see one Database is about 6 gigs and has a log file that is actually larger then the database file.

All that being said I think that I am going to have a lot of work to do in the next couple of months. Should be fun though and I am sure that I will run into some things that I have never seen before. You know, like a SQL Server 2000 instance with over 100 databases on it.

I will try to get a script together to find all the instances and when I do I will post it here. I will also post on some of the things that I find over the next few weeks and I will post how I handled some of the issues that I run into. Like I said, should be a blast and perhaps this is really what I needed to get the passion back.

MS Certification Test

Colin Smith — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:33:37 +0000

I have scheduled my first certification test for late October. I think that by putting the date on the calendar it will push me to finish my study more quickly. I have not been as vigilent as I would have liked to be so I am lighting the fire so to speak. Also with my new position I think that I will have some big SQL Server Projects down the road pretty quickly. That is a bigger fire for me but all the extra motivation is good for me. I have learned a lot over the last 8 months or so that I have been doing DBA work with Sybase, Oracle, and SQL Server but I still feel like I have so much to learn. Now I will be focusing more on SQL Server so I am really going to start getting my hands dirty on some fun big national projects. I am very excited to be in the mix more than I have been to this point. I am sure that I will have some good stories for you very soon.
Anyway I do not have much time now to get ready for that first test. I think that I am pretty much ready but I want to study more and play in SQL Server more before taking the test. I just do better once the pressure is on. Wish me luck and I will keep you in the loop.

Moving System Databases in MSSQL2005

Colin Smith — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:30:12 +0000

Recently I had to move all system databases for one server to another physical drive. This is pretty simple for all but the Master and SystemRecource databases. For all others you can just do the following and then copy the mdf and ldf files to the new location.

alter database tempdb

Modify File (Name = tempdev, Filename = ‘c:\tempdb\tempdb.mdf’);

alter database tempdb

Modify File (Name = templog, Filename = ‘c:\tempdb\templog.ldf’);

Of course with tempdb you do not need to move the mdf and ldf files and it will be recreated in the new location when the server restarts.

So for Master it is a bit different. First I would double check the current location of the master files by doing the following.

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc

FROM sys.master_files

WHERE database_id = DB_ID(‘master’)

This will give you the current location of the Master Database. Now that we know that lets move it. For master you will have to open up the SQL Server Configuration Manager utility. Highlight the SQL server 2005 Services node on the left and then find your server service on the right. Right click on it and go to Properties. Go to the Advcanced Tab and look for the Startup Options parameter. In here you will see something like the following.

-dC:\tempdb\master.mdf;-eC:\tempdb\LOG\ERRORLOG;-lC:\tempdb\mastlog.ldf

You will notice the -d -e and -l, you must leave all of those switches in the line. They are telling SQL Server the location of the Data, ErrorLog, and Log files. Then modify the path to the path that you would like it to be now. Then click apply and ok to close out of the configuration Manager. Now stop the SQL Server Service and copy the MDF, LDF files and make sure that the folder structure to the ErrorLog file is available as well as check the security and make sure that the account that runs your SQL Server has full access to this new locataion. Once that is all done pull up a command prompt so we can start the SQL Server in Single User mode.

Net Start MSSQL$Instancename /f /T3608 (for named instance)

Net Start MSSQLSERVER /f /T3608 (for default instance)

Once that starts up then do the following to move the systemresource database as well.

ALTER DATABASE mssqlsystemresource
MODIFY FILE (NAME=data, FILENAME= ‘D:\SqlData\mssqlsystemresource.mdf’);
GO
ALTER DATABASE mssqlsystemresource
MODIFY FILE (NAME=log, FILENAME= ‘ D:\SqlData\mssqlsystemresource.ldf’);

now go back to the command prompt and stop the sql server by doing:

Net stop MSSQL$InstanceName (for named instance)

Net Stop MSSQLSERVER (for default instance)

Now mive the systemresource mdf and ldf files to the new location and lets start it up in single user mode again like we did above.

Now do the following:

ALTER DATABASE mssqlsystemresource SET READ_ONLY;

and now stop the service again. Now we are ready to start it up normally and if all went and goes well you should be all set. Not to big of a deal but be very careful when doing this. Make sure you have a backup of Master and make sure that you backup the original startup options just in case you need to go back. Safety first here. You do not want what should be a simple task to be a horrific event.

Thanks and let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Questions about health check script

Colin Smith — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:13:24 +0000

I recieved a comment that contained a question about my previous post about writing a script to output a health check of SQL Server.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/dba/powershell-sql-server-health-check-script/

The following is the question:

should we make anychanges for this do and what are the fields i need to provide at this columns: #Read thru the contents of the SQL_Servers.txt file
#$servers = Import-Csv “\pni-vmdbasqld$monitoringinputssqltab.txt”
$servers = Import-Csv “\ent-pocpacapcx01d$monitoringsqltab.txt”

So You should make changes to the $servers variable and point it to the input file that you are going to be using. My csv file has the following columns in it and you can adjust to yours to make it fit your needs.

Monitor,Server,Instance,TorP,ErrorLog,Ping,OS2000

Those are the things that I have found that I use in multiple scripts to deal with SQL Server. The Monitor is jsut a Y or N value to tell my monitoring scripts if I want to monitor that server at this time. Then the physical host name is the Server value, instance is NULL if default and the name of the instance if named, TorP is T if the server is Test and P if Prod, ErrorLog is the location of the errorlog on the filesystem, Ping is also a Y or N value used by my Ping Servers Script to tell it if I want it to be pinged, and OS200 tells my scripts if the server is running Server 2000 or not. That is important since OS2000 can not have Powershell installed.

Hope that helps and if you have any other questions or comments please let me know.

MSSQL Server Renaming Physical Host

Colin Smith — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:31:12 +0000

Recently I had a server that hosts a MSSQL 2005 SQL Server named instance and the Windows group decided that the name of the server had to be changed. I thought that this may cuase an issue since the MSSQL Server name is ‘hostname\instancename’. I did a bit of research and found that a solution is available for this problem. At first I thought that I may have to reinstall a new instance of SQL Server in order to get the name correct. I did not want to go thru all of that though.

I found that MS has a couple of Stored Procs that will help with this problem.

sp_dropserver ‘hostname\instancename’ –of the old server\instancename

sp_addserver ‘hostname\instancename’, ‘local’ –of the new server\instancename

I found that when I did a select @@servername I still got the old server name returned. I also found that when I did a sp_helpserver I got the new name. I decided I would restart the server to see if that would update the @@servername variable. I right clicked on the server and said restart. After it cam back up I got a ‘NULL’ from select @@servername. I did not understand why and really still do not. I was able to resolve the issue by going to the services.msc and restarting the SQL Server Service from there. Now I see the new server name from select @@servername as well as sp_helpserver.

SQL Server Certs

Colin Smith — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:36:45 +0000

I have been talking about what I would like to do to further my education and my carreer as a DBA. I started reading the books in order to study for my MCITP DBA certification and the other members of my team decided that they would like to do the same. They both ordered the books as well and now we are going to attempt to get the certification as a team. We just started working as a group on this and we are doing a 3 hour study session per week and trying to get three chapters of the book done per week. We read the chapters on our own and then we can work the problems, case scenarios, and the examples in the book together. This is great since if any one of us has any questions we can talk about it and make sure that we all understand the concepts.

I think I will gain the most out of this arrangement since I am the new guy still and they have a lot more experiance than I do. I recommend trying to do this type of thing in a group for a couple of reasons.

1. For me this will really push me forward and I will be more driven to get it all done

2. I work better in a group and if I have others that understand concepts I learn best from them.