18Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SCOM SQL Agent Job Defaults

Uncategorized
I'm working through implementing SCOM, specifically the SQL Server Management Packs. I've been tweaking and tuning and for the most part I'm really impressed with how MS configured the defaults. Until today. Since I've hit all the really big and important monitors & rules (at least the ones that have caused problems) I'm starting to drill down a bit. I just hit the Duration monitor for SQL Agent Jobs. The run time for a warning state is 1 minute and an error state in 2 minutes. OK. So any backup on a database over about 2gb in size is going to go into a warning state? I don't think so. What the heck were these guys thinking of?
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17Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Presentation Last Week

Misc, SQL Server, T-SQL
Last week I presented at the Southern New England SQL Server User Group (SNESSUG) where I'm the Program Director. I presented from the book, Dissecting Execution Plans, that is supposed to be published any day now. I kept it basic and it flowed very well. The audience seemed receptive and there were a few questions. Mostly around figuring out what to do when you saw certain problems within the execution plans. Since that was the goal of the presentation, I was ready for most of the questions. I got stumped once on a Constant Scan operation. I finally looked it up this morning and feel silly. Here's the query: INSERT INTO [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Address]      ([AddressLine1]      ,[AddressLine2]      ,[City]      ,[StateProvinceId]      ,[PostalCode]      ,[rowguid]      ,[ModifiedDate] VALUES ('1313 Mockingbird Lane'…
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07Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Unit Testing Database Code

Tools
Steve Jones, in his daily email from SQL Server Central, supplied a link to a terrific article in the MSDN magazine. Apply Test-Driven Development to your Database Projects. It was written by Jamie Laflen who is a Tech Lead on the DBPro team.  I've written a couple of articles on database unit testing, but none of them touch this. It's the new gold standard for introducing the topic to beginners (and lending a helping hand to experienced users). It's worth a read, or even two. I'm going to go back and review it a couple of times with Visual Studio open and a project running. No word yet on new virtuals. I'm going to work on another set of tests that I have to run. More on that later.
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06Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Server 2008 November CTP

Uncategorized
My fault, my fault, my most grevious fault... I installed the November CTP to my virtual machine without making a backup of the virtual first. Now I can't get the November CTP to uninstall and the February CTP won't install on top of it. ARRRGGGGH! Anyway, I'll be getting back to 2008 tomorrow, hopefully, after the admin guys get me a new virtual.
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