One of my clients has applications that use MSDTC. We’re spinning up a SQL Server 2016 Availability Group to take advantage of the MSDTC support it introduced. Most of these distributed transactions take place across linked servers. And of course the new servers are in a new domain with…
You can download the latest build of Is It SQL from my consulting site. You can now view the databases on a server. And you can click on a column header to sort that column. And no, my fantasy baseball team in 2015 didn’t do very well. Unfortunately this…
This release includes a few minor bug fixes and smaller enhancements. Thanks to everyone that tried it out and reported back. At the bottom of the README.html I include my email address if you’d like to provide feedback. I’d love to hear what you like or what…
I’ve been working on a simple monitoring tool for SQL Server over the last few months. I often find myself asking “What just happened?” and “Was it SQL Server?”. I wanted a small utility I could leave running at clients that would answer that question. It needed to be…
We were experiencing trouble installing SQL Server 2014 onto a Windows 2012 R2 VM. These are new production boxes so I was being very careful. The problem manifest itself in two ways: A clean installation using our service account got almost all the way through and then failed with the…
I’ve seen this error off and on in our environment for a while. The full error looks like this: Login failed for user DOMAIN\login’. Reason: Token-based server access validation failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. [CLIENT: X.X.X.X] Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State:…
I did another SQL Server migration over the weekend that dealt with linked servers. I’ve seen all kinds of odd naming schemes and there are a few I like and a few I suggest you avoid. Don’t name your linked server for its IP address. At some point…
People have uploaded nearly one millions rows of trace data to TraceTune. That’s enough data to start to look at the results in aggregate. The first thing I want to look at is logical reads. This is the easiest metric to identify and fix. When you upload a trace,…
We have a requirement to build a test environment where certain tables get reset from production every night. These are mainly lookup tables. I played around with all kinds of fancy solutions and finally settled on a series of MERGE statements. And being lazy I didn’t want to write…
I’m trying to make TraceTune (and eventually ClearTrace) work the way I do. My typical query tuning session goes like this: Run a trace and upload to TraceTune/ClearTrace Tune the slowest queries Goto 1 I might do this two or three times in one day and then not…