SQL Server auditing with Server and Database audit specifications November 20, 2017 by Dinesh Asanka Auditing is a key feature in any application or any system as it provides end users with better analysis for administrators. Apart from analysis, auditing can be used as a troubleshooting mechanism too. Apart from organizational reasons, there are compliance reasons for enabling auditing depending on the domain of operation. Auditing is mainly about answering four questions, i.e. who, when, what and where. However, depending on the situation, it might be decided what questions of the mentioned four should be answered. Read more »
Point in Time Recovery with SQL Server December 19, 2016 by Dinesh Asanka Introduction How often are you working with multiple environments? For example, if you are a database administrator who is responsible for a production environment as well as another environment, it most likely that you will be working with both environments simultaneously. What is the probability that you will execute a script on production, which actually needs to be executed on the other environment? I would say it is high. To prove this point let me present you an example. Read more »
Archiving SQL Server data using Partitions August 29, 2016 by Dinesh Asanka The Partition feature was introduced in the SQL Server 2005. This article is to cover how partitioning can be useful when it comes to archiving of SQL Server data in a database. Please note that this article does not cover how partitioning works and its configurations in detail. Read more »
How to Avoid CXPACKETs? November 25, 2015 by Dinesh Asanka CXPACKET is one of the famous wait type that database administrators are experiencing. Before moving into the details of CXPACKET wait type, first let us discuss about the waits in SQL Server in brief. SQL Server is a mini operating system. When SQL Server is executing any task and if for any reason it has to wait for resources to execute the task, it will wait in a list until it gets the relevant resources. This list is called Waiter list or suspended list. This is not a queue as whenever that task is ready with required resources it will move to the runnable queue which means that it is ready to execute whenever the processor is free to execute. Depending on the type of the wait, there are more than 200 wait types. CXPACKET, WRITELOG, ASYNC_NETWORK_IO are the most common wait types. This is very brief discussion about waits. For any case where this is not clear, it will be better to get more details from other sources as this article is not intend to discuss about waits in detail. Read more »
