Do You Have Your Free 90 Day SSWUG Membership Yet?
You can get it quickly just by registering for the conference. By registering before 12/31/2007, you will receive a complimentary 90 day membership to the site. It’s easy to register and the conference will feature more than 36 technical tracks, exhibits, no sales info in the tech tracks, and much more. Learn what you need to know to get up to speed with SQL Server and be ready for more advanced approaches and topics for your environment. We guarantee you’ll get many times your registration cost in good, solid learning.
Thanks To Our Sponsors
We’ve worked with some great companies this year! We really appreciate their support and help in bringing you SSWUG. Over the next few days I’ll be bringing you a list of the different sponsors, big and small. Take a moment and check it out – there are some outstanding products here!
dbMaestro – Change and Configuration Management
Burstek – The World’s Choice for Internet Security
SelectViews SQL Server Show Posted
Today’s show is a quick interview with Chris Shaw, taking a look at the SSWUG SQL Server Virtual Conference and the different things under way to get ready. Find out more about the conference here, and check out today’s show, here:
Holiday Schedule
Today is the last newsletter until January 2nd while we take time off for the crew behind SSWUG to be with families and friends. We hope you’ll do the same and that you have a fantastic holiday and New Years!
OMIGOSH III
From Josh (a great posting to end the year!):
"The overall process I follow generally includes determining the environment, identifying the issue, and figuring out whether we’re dealing with a hardware performance issue or something more designdevelopment oriented (bad database design, poor T-SQL, etc.).
For me, the process goes something like this:
First things first; we need to identify the environment.
1. Check all logs: SQL Server logs, Windows Event (System and Application) Logs.
a. Identify recurring errors reported in the logs.
2. Check sp_configure, and review values for the following:
a. Affinity
b. AWE Enabled
c. Default Trace Enabled (on a SQL 2005 server)
d. Max degree of parallelism
e. Max server memory
f. Min server memory
g. Xp_cmdshell
3. Check sp_dboption for all critical databases.
a. Check autoclose, autoshrink, and recovery mode.
4. Review server hardware configuration
a. Cluster?
b. CPU/RAM
c. Storage Technology (SAN, etc.)
5. Review network access and topology
a. Are client machines physically distributed?
b. Network speed of server farm versus client machines.
Now we know (kind of) what we’re working with. Next we need to identify exactly what problems the users/developers experiencing.
Questions to ask:
1. When did the issues start?
2. What is the impact on the application? (Takes longer to retrieve records, takes forever to insert records, timeouts, etc.)
3. Have any schema changes been made recently? If so, what where they?
4. How large is the database?
5. Is there a DevTest system? How does it compare in terms of the issues that have been identified?
These are the things I tackle when coming in to a new environment and I’ve been told to “fix” a server first thing. There are obviously all of the “First Day as a DBA” tasks that can tie in (alerts?), but these are the things you MUST know in order to even start to get a grasp on an issue in the environment."
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