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Featured Script

How to Identify backup tables within production databases

The Voice of the DBA

The Single Pane of Glass

One of the things that I've seen talked about quite in the DevOps movement is a single pane of glass. That phrase seems to be in use to describe a way of quickly understanding the state of your environment. It could be the view of the software versions deployed in environments throughout the development process or the status and capabilities of your infrastructure. In either case, it's a holistic view of your portion of the organization.

I don't think this is much different from the idea of a global dashboard that might be produced for business people. I've seen no shortage of those during my career. Certainly lots of business intelligence projects have been based on the idea of a single view of data that provides insight and assists decision making. Those ideas have been adopted by plenty of organizations that are moving to a DevOps process for software development.

I'm wondering if any of you have a dashboard for your particular job? This could be in infrastructure as a DBA, where you have a single view of your database servers, maybe status and alerts? Perhaps you just a monitoring system like SQL Monitor to keep track of important data related to all the instances under your responsibility. Perhaps you have custom information important for your organization such as the flow of data in ETL processes, numbers of transactions, or some other measures to measure health or performance.

Maybe you're a developer that wants to know the status of all builds for the various projects under active development. As teams look to produce more reliable software, they often want to know the where their changes are deployed, if the code passes all tests, and even which work items are in which states. Azure Boards or DLM Dashboard are examples of how teams keep track of their responsibilities.

There are any number of ways that organizations can keep an eye on the state of their systems, but I do think that any high performing group will have some way of measuring their work. After all, if you don't know the state of your system, how can you determine if you're getting better or worse.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Featured Contents

In-Memory OLTP Table Checkpoint Processes Performance Comparison

Nagaraj Venkatesan from SQLServerCentral.com

The article demonstrates one of the major performance enhancements in checkpoint processes in "in memory tables" More »

Redgate's Estate Management Research Survey

Redgate invites you to take their Estate Management Research Survey. Their aim for this questionnaire is to gather some information around the importance of certain tasks within the wider umbrella of ‘Estate Management’ and your satisfaction with your current solutions to them. The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete. Help them continue to support and build relevant tools to help you in your job and in recognition of you taking time to help us, they will award an Amazon voucher or equivalent to the value of $50 to one lucky survey participant. This will be determined in early October 2018. More »

6 DBA Lessons I Wish Someone Would Have Taught Me Earlier

Additional Articles from Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog

The name of the Agent job isn't necessarily what it does, and just because your'e not getting failure emails doesn't mean the job is working. More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Data Types Word Search

Kenneth Fisher from SQLServerCentral Blogs

Just for fun here is a word search with all of the data types available in SQL Server. Well, two... More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - SOS to ADS

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral Blogs

When Microsoft announced SQL Operations Studio last year, I wasn’t thrilled. The move to a VS Code shell was less... More »

Question of the Day

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If I have a SQL Server 2017 Linux instance installed, can I use Active Directory authentication for logins?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I decide that I need to ensure data used in dynamic SQL conforms to SQL Server identifier rules by adding QUOTENAME() to validate variables. However, in the string I am assembling, I want to be sure that I don't have any implicit conversions. If I use QUOTENAME(), what type of data is returned to me?

Answer: nvarchar() is always returned

Explanation:

QUOTENAME() always returns a Unicode string, an nvarchar. IIf an invalid identifier string is passed in, then NULL is returned, but the type is still nvarchar().

Ref: QUOTENAME - click here

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Featured Script

How to Identify backup tables within production databases

Kwasi Date-Bah from SQLServerCentral.com

This is a useful script to identify tables within your database(s) created by developers.

Possibly they have been created with a name that contains backup or Temp.

I developed this script recently to identify what tables could be removed, to return much needed space to a database server.

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