Database

Join me on Oct 21st for a Clustering with iSCSI Presentation

All,

On October 21st, 2009 at 11am (Pacific) / 2pm (Eastern) I’m going to be presenting a free Webcast on how to setup a Windows 2008 Cluster when using iSCSI.  Additionally I’ll be going over some tuning tricks you can use to improve the performance of your iSCSI network. Continued »

HA and DR require the same techniques right?

While many of the technologies used for HA and DR are similar (or even the same) HA and DR are two different types of events which should be handled differently. Continued »

Dates can easily be the hardest datatype to work with.

The datetime data type can be one of the hardest to work with when it comes to index optimization.  Most queries that use a datetime data type for filtering (part of the where clause) only want to match the date portion of the value.  Most people handle this via a convert function around the date column.  This causes the index that you create to become useless as the convert function causes the index to be scanned not seeked.

Continued »

Whitepaper on why database maintenance is important

Today I’m publishing a white paper which I wrote for our Customer Service department to give to our customers. It explains why database maintenance is so important in keeping your database happy and healthy. Continued »

SQL Server 2008 Clustering Article in SQL Server Magazine

For those of you who haven’t check out this months SQL Server Magazine, the cover article was written by yours truly about Clustering SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008.  This is an updated version of the article I did last December on Clustering SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003.

I hope that you find it handy.  (Subscription is required.)

Denny

Single Instance vs Multiple Instances

I see this question quite a bit, should I use a single instance or one instance per application database on my server. Continued »

Join me on Sept 15, 2009 as we talk about Clustering SQL Server without a SAN

On September 15, 2009 I’ll be hosting a webcast entitled “How to Set Up a Cost-Effective Windows Server 2008 Cluster with SQL Server 2008 and Tune The Performance“.  During this webcast I’ll be showing how to use Starwind Software’s iSCSI Server software to replace to need for a SAN when creating your Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 server.

The presentation will start at 2PM EST, 11AM PST.  Pre-registration is required using the above link.

Do note that this presentation will be done a little bit backwards as we’ll dive into the technical content write away, then hit the slide show with the SQL Installation is running in the background.

See you there.

Denny

Changing the default owner when creating objects

When a user that doesn’t have sysadmin rights creates objects by default they will be created in the schema that is the users default schema.  Now the catch to this is that if you grant the user rights into the database via a domain group that domain group then the user doesn’t have a default schema.

So, now how do you fix this?  Unfortunately the only fix to this is to grant the users Windows login as a separate login, then grant this login rights into the database.  You can then grant the user which is mapped directly to the users Windows login a default schema of dbo.

Because of this the user should specify the schema when creating objects.

The downside to this is that they won’t be able to use the object editor to create new tables.  All new tables will need to be created in T/SQL directly.

Denny

Non-sysadmins create tables under own schema

When using SQL Server 2000 and the user doesn’t have sysadmin rights, and their login isn’t mapped to the dbo user within the database all objects created will be, by default created under the user schema.

This is the normal behavior of SQL Server 2000.  In order to allow users who are not members of the sysadmin fixed server role to create objects under the dbo schema by default you have to map their login to the dbo user, even if they are a member of the dbo fixed database role.

To work around this, in the T/SQL code specify the owner of the database object.  If your developer is using Enterprise Manager to create the new tables before saving the table, click on the properties button in the upper left hand corner of the Enterprise Manager window (second from the left).  Then change the owner drop down from their username to dbo.  There is no way to default this setting to dbo so it will need to be changed for each new table being created.

Denny

When clustering SQL 2008, SQL Server may reject the Key

When installing SQL Server 2008 Enterprise onto my new SQL Cluster I downloaded the media from Microsoft and dropped it onto a network share and installed it.  The first node went perfectly, the second node, not so much.  When I went to install on the second node I would get to the screen which asked for the Key (it is a volume license install so the key was already there) and when I clicked next it told me that the key was invalid and the installer exited. Continued »