SQL Server World

Here are the #TSQL2sDay prompts from Erin Stellato.

Here is how my day look on Thursday July 12^th 2012.

7:00 AM

Came in 2 hours early to patch a critical sql server. Installation of 25 windows patches took 30 minutes.
Completing it with verifying everything another half hour. I used the waiting time to check my outlook inbox and my Hotmail emails.

8:00 AM

Replied to several emails that needed my attention. Spoke to my manager (offsite) about the issues
that happened yesterday as he and other Team members have to pitch in to patch and restart 12 servers yesterday. Those were my responsibility but I had an off day yesterday.

9:00 AM

2 days ago, I have ugraded 8 OLAP servers to SQL server 2008 R2 (SP1) from SQL server 2008. Today the team lead is saying that  they are experiencing and issue and it looks like a bug introduced by upgrade. He wanted to know how difficult it is to undo the upgrade. DBA’s life is always challenging in that way. So the normal looking day turned into an interesting one. I kicked myself into high gear and started my research.

10:00 AM

Attended a webcast on sql 2012 Availability Group from Pragmatic Works by Ross LaForte.

11:00 AM

 We recently had a new Dell SAN called Compllent attached to 3 servers each of them have a DB of 10 TB. They are exactly same and used for reporting. They are loaded from staging DB in parallel. Ops informed me they need to create a snapshot and I have to detach DB one by one on each serve. Steps involve: lien the server, detach db, stop sql server, ops did the snapshot, I have to start the sql server and attach DB. Verify that everything is fine. This database has monthly filegroups (for easier backup strategy) so need to make sure all FGs are attached. Let the attach create the new log file.

12:00 PM

Went to grab a sandwich and did my lunch at my desk. Logged my WebMD fitness and food log. Checked tweeter and followed couple of links to read if it fascinated me. Tweeted what I found interesting.

1:00 PM

 I have patched one server on Tuesday on which we use 3^rd party high availability tool called Neverfail. It is very different then Microsoft failover cluster or Microsoft replication but both these terms are used in it. Neverfail cluster has 3 nodes namely Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. The replication Usually takes 20 hours (in our environment) to complete but it was still running after 60 hours. Opened ticket with them which they will Work with me tomorrow but in the mean time I gave 4 gb more to OS so replication can move faster. Reviewed Logs to find out any other hardware related issue. Also I have to do lot of communication with users of this server.

2:00 PM

 One development server was scheduled to be upgraded to sql server 2012 today. I had prepared by running upgrade advisor and informed the interested party about its report showing some issues with the code after the upgrade. Still they wanted to move forward with in place upgrade. But I have to postpone it after I received installation error because C: drive had only 2 GB free (total C: drive was 25 GB, old 2950 dell server). Requested Ops team to create a VM replacement for this server. There was nothing that can be deleted from C: drive. SQL 2008 R2 install was on C: drive and sql 2012 in place upgrade install needs atleast 6 GB of free space on C: to work. My plan is to install sql 2008 R2 on VM. Restore user databases and logins and jobs and linked server and whatever packages user need to migrate. Then do the in place upgrade to SQL 2012.

3:00 PM

Helped Junior DBA (remote), hired 2 months ago, to install sql server in a step by step fashion according to our

SOP. Helped her via IM, phone and email.

4:00 PM

 There were few requests pending since morning to give permission on certain object to certain groups and users. I completed that and informed the users. Next I completed this log to record my day today.

5:00 PM

 Wrote email to ops to change the registry setting on one of our backup servers. I have researched the errors on Tuesday and had 2 documents prepared. Over the weekend most of our backup jobs run on most of our servers and goes to one backup server. Sometimes backups (usually transaction log backups) fail with OS error 87 ‘setendoffile’ that end of file not found. Apparently the error occurs when OS estimates certain space for backup but the compressed backup actually takes different amount of space so when OS tries to correct the end of file it sometimes times out. Solution we will try is to add a registry key of SessTimeout = 300 seconds. Default is 60 seconds.