SQL Server Snippets | Paul Hewson

I use the dbWarden alerts to inform me if a SQL job is taking longer to complete than normal and I got one this morning:   Click to enlarge I noticed by looking at the history this purge job was gradually taking longer and longer to complete each day since I installed it again ( see mylast post on this ): RunDate RunTime Duration ExecutionStatus JobName 04/10/2013 02:00:01 00:00:45 Succeded mdw_purge_data_[MDW] 05/10/2013 02:00:00 00:13:27 Succeded mdw_purge_data_[MDW] 06/10/2013 02:00:00 00:17:03 Succeded mdw_purge_data_[MDW] 07/10/2013 02:00:01 00:30:58 Succeded mdw_purge_data_[MDW] 08/10/2013 02:00:01 01:04:25 Succeded mdw_purge_data_[MDW] 09/10/2013 02:00:01 01:41:39 Succeded mdw_purge_data_[MDW] 10/10/2013 02:00:01 02:35:17 Succeded md...

The SQL Server Management Data Warehouse (when you first come across it) seems to promise so much if the verbiage from Microsoft and some other websites is to to believed. But when you install it you may find that it is not as useful as it could be. This is a shame but we are currently only on v2 of the product with SQL 2012 so one hopes it will improve in subsequent versions. However, it probably is worth playing with if you have never used it before - at least you can show your boss some reports on general server health when he asks for it and you have nothing else in place. There is one big problem with it though if you decide that you don't want to use it any more, uninstalling it is not supported! Mad, I know. But as usual some very helpful people in the community have worked out, what seems to me, a pretty safe way of doing it. I had a problem with my MDW. The data collector jobs were causing a lot of deadlocking on some production servers and impacting performance. I...

There is a handy little "by product", if you like, when running queries which means you can quickly generate scripts to do different things. Below is an example of generating multiple "attach" commands that you can copy from the results pane into the main SSMS window for execution. I have found this very handy in the past: SELECT 'CREATE DATABASE [' + name + '] ON ( FILENAME = N''F:\MSSQL\Data\' + name + '.mdf'' ), ( FILENAME = N''E:\MSSQL\Log\' + name + '_log.ldf'' )  FOR ATTACH GO ' FROM master . dbo . sysdatabases WHERE name not in ( 'master' , 'msdb' , 'model' , 'tempdb' ) ORDER BY name

There are a large number of DBCC commands and it's easy to forget their names and syntax/order of parameters. To help you can run the commands below: -- Show list of all DBCC commands DBCC TRACEON ( 2520 ) DBCC HELP ( '?' ) GO -- Show help for specific command DBCC HELP ( show_statistics ) This piece of code is ideal for a  Snippet .