Category: Database Admin

Articles related to the administrating SQL Server 2008 R2.

Staying Connected

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There are many companies in the world that have offices in remote locations. Sometimes downloading software media from Microsoft or Oracle might take minutes if not hours. During this time, your terminal session with the remote computer might time out. How do you prevent this from happening? The windows server operating system allows two concurrent remote desktop (RDP) connections. However, there are out of the box settings that automatically determine idle session limit and when to disconnected a user. I am including a link to MSDN that describes remote desktop…

Page Anatomy – Part 2

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I am going continue my series of articles describing how information is stored and organized in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Today, I am going to talk about the Database Boot Page. All of the information is a gleamed from SQL Server 2008 Internals book by Kalen Delaney. If it is not on your bookshelf, I suggest you go out and by a copy. The online MCM training videos from Paul Randal are also an excellent resource. A single page (8K) is the smallest unit in which SQL Server allocates…

Page Anatomy – Part 1

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I am going start a series of articles describing how information is stored and organized in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Today, I am going to talk about the File Header Page. Every database is defined by at least two file types. The first file type is one primary (*.mdf) data file with zero or more optional secondary (*.ndf) data files. The second file type are log (*.ldf) files. We will be looking at the primary data file during these talks. All of the information is a gleamed from SQL…

Azure SQL Database

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I recently presented at SQL Saturday 184 in North Haven and was able to listen to Grant Fritchey’s present “Query Tuning in the Clouds”. What I got out of the presentation was the sense all your tuning skills could be used to optimize a Windows Azure SQL database. I knew Windows Azure SQL Databases have been around for a couple of years but never had the time or need to research them. With a possible data center consolidation in the future, I was wondering if my company could leverage a…

Finding Database Info

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If you are a production Database Administrator (DBA), you might be lucky and have all your servers on the same revision of SQL Server. This is a very uncommon situation since many third party vendors do not keep up with Microsoft releases or your company might not find the return on investment (ROI) for having the lastest software. My company falls into the later category. We have some business applications that are bound to SQL Server 2000. Since it is not broken, the company is not willing to fix it.…