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Transaction Log VLF Alarm

The Voice of the DBA

The Matrix

Do you want the red pill or the blue one?

Many of us know the famous scene in The Matrix where Neo decides if he will come out of his dream. We also see the exciting moments in the movie where he has various martial arts downloaded to his brain, and discovers he "knows kung fu" in a small fraction of time. Certainly he doesn't ever need to physically practice the art, but much of learning is comprehending and understanding a subject in our brains.

We aren't at the point of desiring a skill and purchasing a download. Yet. However there is research into using various types of stimulation to actually help improve learning and training. Using pilots and flight training, a complex and varied skill involving both physical coordination and mental understanding, the researchers think they can affect learning. Which is amazing.

This is barely scratching the surface of learning directly in the brain, but it is interesting to see people researching the topic. After all, this is an area that ought to be of great interest to those of us working in technology, where the acquisition of new skills is important. Few of us do it well, and any improvement that could dramatically improve our capabilities to adapt and grow as technology rapidly advances, would be welcome.

Unless it involves electrical shock potential. In that case, I'll stick with my slow read-and-practice method for learning new skills.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music.

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Featured Contents

Enumerate Windows Group Members

Lowell Izaguirre from SQLServerCentral.com

Here a quick script showing how to get all the Active Directory users in a AD group. More »

Documenting SQL Server with PowerShell

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

SQL Server instances are generally poorly-documented. How easily can you tell if something has changed? How easily can you check that there is adequate space for growth? Are you up-to-date with licenses? What errors are happening? Who has accessing the system? Before PowerShell, it was difficult to be on top of all this. Now you can, with the help of Sander's database documenter. More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Recompile Monitoring using XEvents

SteveHood79 from SQLServerCentral Blogs

Recompiles can be a hidden bottleneck on your server, and it may not be too obvious. I should know, it... More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Query the status of SQL Agent jobs

matt.bowler from SQLServerCentral Blogs

I’ve been involved in building a solution on top of SQL Server peer to peer replication (SQL 2014 SP1) and... More »

Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I am working with Row Level Security and have a function that determines if a particular user should have access to rows in a table. My function looks like this:

 CREATE FUNCTION DBO.RLS_Customer_Check (@username AS sysname) RETURNS TABLE WITH SCHEMABINDING AS   RETURN SELECT 1 AS RLS_Customer_Check_Result      WHERE @username = USER_NAME() GO

I have a table, CustomerAccessList, with a column for CustomerID and UserName. I add a filter predicate as follows:

 CREATE SECURITY POLICY rls_CustomerFilter ADD FILTER PREDICATE dbo.rls_customer_check(customerid) ON dbo.CustomerAccessList; GO

Now the bsmith user wants to insert a row into the CustomerAccessList table for a new customer, with no rows in the table matching the customerID. The bsmith user has rights to insert/update the table.

Here is the insert statement that bsmith runs:

 INSERT dbo.CustomerAccessList ( CustomerID, username ) VALUES ( 5 -- CustomerID , 'bsmith' -- username )

What happens when they perform the insert with this FILTER PREDICATE?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

The SSIS Term Extraction Transformation can work with which languages?

Answer: English only

Explanation:

The Term Extraction Transformation works with English only. It contains it's own dictionary.

Ref: Term Extraction Transformation - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141809(v=sql.110).aspx

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

Transaction Log VLF Alarm

Edward Pochinski from SQLServerCentral.com

This will send a alert email using native DB Mail when the VLF counts from any auto growth on transaction logs take place too much. Best practice is to have a auto growth set to a reasonable size growth like from 256-512mb a growth. We had to put his in place as a counter measue from an outage caused by too many VLF's and ther log reader agent had issues reading the transaction logs. One thing you need to do is create the table in a database that matches the references in the code for the insert and selects performed. This worked great and alerted until we foun the nice very large size this tran log needed to be for the maint taking place Sunday AM once fully completed. Create table code supplied at the bottom od the code. Hope you find this useful.

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