Sqlserver

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Erik Darling (blog) asks us to produce a video

• You can talk about whatever you want, but it has to be a video
• Non-video entries will not be televised
• You don’t have to be on camera
• You can host the video anywhere you want
• You must link back to this post so I get a pingback to find your post
• You must include the T-SQL Tuesday Logo

It seems like no matter how long you work with a system beyond a trivial size, you’ll find something new every so often. A little while ago, I found a table without about a dozen columns, no data, and was referenced in only one place across an entire database hosting nearly 1000 tables and over 8000 stored procedures. Why does this thing even exist?

To protect the innocent(ish?), obviously I’m changing the names of everything here. I was looking into some performance issues and found a very short stored procedure being called from another stored procedure which opened with this query:

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select
    MyShortString
    ,MyLongString
    ,ZipCode
    ,StateAbbr
into #TempTable
from SystemUtility;

Sometimes, work tasks and questions that come up in the SQL Server Community Slack coincide.

A couple weeks ago, DrData asked

With SET STATISTICS IO ON, is there really no way to show the TOTALS at the bottom? There are some nice tools like StatisticsParser but it sure would be nice to see the totals of all values right at the bottom, especially when there are many tables.

The task at hand in the office was a need to do the same thing, but with SET STATISTICS TIME ON. So I got to thinking…I can PowerShell my way through this, right?

The Problem

While performing an instance migration this spring, I happened upon something I didn’t expect in dbatools. It should have been a simple backup/restore copy of the databases, with the backup files residing on a fileshare on the destination server after being copied there. I kept getting a warning that the backup files I was attempting to restore couldn’t be read, and the restores (via Restore-DbaDatabase) wouldn’t execute.

I checked permissions on the server over and over again. Both on the filesystem and for the share that I was attempting to read from. Even more curious, if I executed the restore database statements directly from within Management Studio, the databases restored without issue.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a bit of a project to tidy up the indexes in a sizeable database. This database has over 900 tables, and there are quite a few indexes which I have long suspected don’t need to exist for a variety of reasons. Some indexes are redundant, others don’t get used, still others could be combined into a single index. By reducing the number of indexes, we can improve write performance in the database, and the size of the database itself. But we have to do it carefully.

The Prompt

In July, Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asked us to make September Community Tools Awareness Month.

In September, I want you to improve community knowledge about one free tool that you rely on every week in order to get your job done.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, but I’m going to select the amazing PowerShell module dbatools.

dbatools Is for Everyone

Despite what the name may imply, dbatools is a valuable toolkit for anyone who needs to interact with SQL Server. It’s not just about upgrades and migrations anymore. I like to tell people it’ll make them look like a wizard to their colleagues because of how quickly things can get done with just a few commands.

Note: I originally wrote this a few years ago but never posted it. It resurfaced when I migrated the blog so it’s being posted now.

After watching Kevin Kline’s (blog | twitter) webinar Essential Tasks to a Successful Cloud Migration, I downloaded the T-SQL scripts to run them against some of my databases. One of the included queries identifies tables with forwarded fetches and right on top of the list was a table with over 1.6 billion forwarded fetches in the roughly 3 weeks since the instance was last restarted.

A collection of the resources mentioned in my PASS Data Community Summit session Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, including bonus content!

Over the summer, I spent some (a lot of) time working on updates to a script at work which runs multiple processes in parallel. Everything seemed to work OK for a while, but then everything broke. It broke right around the time dbatools 1.1 dropped, so I started thinking that something must have changed there. As it turns out, it was entirely my fault and I hope this post will help you avoid the same trap.

I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit! This year’s event runs November 8th through 12th. I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit!