Happy New Year

No tech blog post today.

I just want to wish everyone a happy new year.

Denny

How to convert a standalone instance to a clustered instance

This question has come up a couple of times on various forums on the Inter-webs so I figured I’d write up something a little more in-depth than I’d be able to do on a forum.

There’s no way to easily flip a standalone SQL Server instance to a clustered instance.  However moving a standalone instance into a clustered instance isn’t that tough, but it will require some down time to the clients. Continued »

Windows 2008 R2 Core mode has some great changes

Windows 2008 introduced us to code mode.  It was great, an ultra thin server OS, with little overhead as there’s no UI.  It was as awesome improvement to Windows, unless you actually wanted to use any other Microsoft technologies.  There’s no .NET support so you couldn’t run .NET services, or ASP.NET websites.  You couldn’t install SQL Server, or Exchange.  If you wanted classic ASP, or PHP then you were set.  Pretty must the only real use for these was as as domain controllers and other infrastructure users.

Windows 2008 R2 core mode is actually useful. Continued »

Windows 2008 R2 Management

When I was at the Windows 2008 R2 release there was a ton of new information that was talked about.  There are all new management tools for Windows 2008 R2.  In fact there is an all new methology within Microsoft when it comes to building the management tools.

Continued »

CXPacket isn’t the cause, it is a symptom

All to often when people deal with parallel queries they see that some threads of the query have a wait type of CXPacket so they assume that the parallel execution plan is causing a problem, but it probably isn’t.

Continued »

Beware of Diskeeper 10 on your servers

Everyone likes nice defragmented SQL Servers.  However if you use Diskeeper to do so be very careful before you upgrade to the new version 10, or if you are going to upgrade to the new version 10 you’ll need to make a small change to your configuration on each SQL Server.

Continued »

Transaction Log files are not safe to delete

All to often I see people online saying that they detach a database then delete the log file to shrink it.  This is a very dangerous operation which can leave you with a corrupt database that you can’t do anything with. Continued »

What you can and can’t do with SAN replication

SAN replication is a very power tool which will let you get real time (or near real time) backups of your database on another location on your storage array, to another storage array at the local site, or to a remote storage array at another site.

However like all technologies there are some things which it is really good at, and some things which it can’t/shouldn’t be used for.  (Everything here is going to be SAN vendor dependent.  This includes features, modules you have to buy, terminology, and probably some other stuff I’m not thinking of.) Continued »

Dual HBAs (or iSCSI ports) should be a requirement for every server

Proper network design is very important to ensuring the highest availability between your storage array and your server.  This design is important weither you are using a Fibre Channel SAN or an iSCSI SAN.  The basic design is the same. Continued »

OPENXML can be a beast sometimes.

Our application includes some search functionality which is pretty complex to deal with.  In a nutshell the user can select multiple values from a couple of lists on the website and use those listed to filter down the rows which are being searched.  These lists are passed into the SQL Server as a couple of XML documents.  We recently had a larger customer call and complain that the search was slow.  I fired up profiler and grabbed the query.  They were right, 6 minutes is a long time for a query to take. Continued »