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Nisarg Upadhyay
Task execution history

Automate consistency checks of SQL database using Windows Task Scheduler

April 20, 2021 by

The SQL database integrity check is one of the most crucial and important tasks of the database administrator. The database integrity task checks the structural integrity and allocation of all database objects and indexes. The integrity checks can be performed by using the DBCC CheckDB command. The CheckDB command is used to identify the corruption in the database. The command performs the following operations on the database.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
Job execution history

Automate SQL database backups using Windows Task Scheduler

April 15, 2021 by

In this article, we will learn how we can automate the backup of SQL database created in SQL Server Express edition. SQL Server Express edition is a lightweight database that has limited functionalities and resource allocation. The SQL Server Express edition does not support SQL Server Agent jobs, so it is tricky to automate various database administration tasks.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
drag-drop index maintenance task

Automate rebuilding SQL Database indexes using Maintenance Plans

April 9, 2021 by

Index maintenance is a vital part of a database administrator’s job. I have worked for few clients who often face performance issues in SQL Database and don’t have a dedicated DBA. I remember that one of our clients was facing performance issues. I logged in to their server and found that they did not set up any index maintenance jobs; therefore, many indexes were fragmented, causing the problem.

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Dinesh Asanka

Elastic Jobs in Azure SQL Database

February 18, 2021 by

Introduction

I have dedicated this article to the topic of Elastic Jobs in Azure SQL Database which is in Public Review. This feature allows you to run scheduled tasks in your Azure SQL Databases. This is similar to SQL Server Agent you have in the On-prem SQL Server versions. However, in Elastic Jobs, you can execute the scheduled tasks in multiple Azure SQL Servers and multiple Databases which is an added advantage when considering the features of SQL Server Agent. Further, this execution performs parallelly.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
Drag and drop Backup database task

Automate SQL database backups using Maintenance Plans

February 12, 2021 by

In this article, we are going to learn how we can automate the backup of the SQL database using database maintenance plans. Data is one of the most important assets of any organization, and as a database administrator, it is our prime responsibility to protect it. There are various tools available that can be used to back up the data. These tools use state of the art technology to protect the data, and some of them are very costly. Instead of using these costly tools, some organizations prefer to use SQL native backups. These backups of SQL database can be automated by SQL Server Agent Jobs or Windows’ task scheduler.

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Aveek Das
Creating job step for OLAP Cube

Advanced Usages of SQL Server Agent

January 8, 2021 by

In this article, I am going to introduce some advanced usages of the SQL Server Agent service in Microsoft SQL Server. In my previous article, Introduction to SQL Server Agent, I have discussed in detail how to use the service and the various components related to the service. To recap briefly, the SQL Server Agent is a job scheduler service within SQL Server and allows us to schedule T-SQL scripts, SSIS jobs, automate database backups and other tasks etc. In the last article, I have shown how to schedule a simple T-SQL script using the SQL Server Agent. This article will focus more on advanced concepts like scheduling a package in SSIS and processing an OLAP cube.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
Screenshot of email

T-SQL scripts to update statistics based on the row modification

December 24, 2020 by

In this article, we are going to learn how we can develop a T-SQL script to update statistics of tables based on the row modification. It is always a challenging task to perform maintenance on a table that has billions of rows. During the early years of my professional career, I was assigned a project and one of our clients had performance issues. The initial analysis showed that due to frequent data modifications, a specific table’s statistics become outdated.

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Aveek Das
Starting the SQL Server Agent Service

Introduction to the SQL Server Agent

December 15, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain in detail about the SQL Server Agent service. This is a windows service that enables database developers and database administrators to schedule jobs on the SQL Server machine. The jobs can be simple T-SQL scripts, stored procedures, SSIS packages or SSAS databases. This service is available on all the editions of SQL Server except the Express edition.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
Job schedule

T-SQL scripts to generate database health reports

October 21, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to show how we can automate a database daily health report using T-SQL scripts. For a senior database administrator, it is always important to review the health of the database server. When a DBA manages many database servers, it becomes difficult to visit every server and review the status of databases, SQL jobs, and backups. To ease the monitoring, I have developed a T-SQL script that populates the following information:

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Nisarg Upadhyay
New Job Schedule that executes a SP to populate the unused tables of SQL Database

Identify unused tables of SQL databases

September 24, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to demonstrate how we can identify the unused tables of a given SQL Database. As a database administrator, we must maintain the tables and objects of the SQL Database. In my organization, when we add a new column or change the data type of a column, we export the data of the existing table in the backup table. Often, we forgot to review and maintain those backup tables. So as a solution, we decided to create a SQL Job that populates the list of unused tables and email the list to the DBA Team for review.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
Backup Query

Refresh a SQL Database using the maintenance plan

July 2, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain how we can refresh a SQL Database using the Maintenance plan. To demonstrate the process, I have configured two virtual machines. I have installed SQL Server 2016 on both. To refresh the SQL database on destination database server, we will generate a copy-only backup of the SQL database on source database server. I have created a network share directory. Both the source and destination server have the read-write permission on it. The backup file will be copied on a shared directory. Once the database is restored to the destination, we will delete the file from the network share directory.

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Jignesh Raiyani
List SQL jobs with status

Audit and Alert SQL Server Jobs Status Changes (Enabled or Disabled)

December 4, 2019 by

In this article, we will talk about how to track enabled or disabled SQL jobs in SQL Server using T-SQL. Users with the Sysadmin role have the default permissions to modify the information of any jobs in SQL Server. If a user is not in this role and wants access to this activity, then the user needs to be given the SQLAgentOperatorRole in the msdb database.

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Ranga Babu
creating elastic job agent in Azure

Azure SQL – Elastic Job Agent

June 24, 2019 by

In this article, we will review on elastic job Agent in Azure SQL and how to configure elastic jobs to run scripts on Azure SQL databases. SQL Server Agent is a powerful component that is used to schedule and execute jobs in SQL server. But in Azure, SQL server agent is available only in managed instances and not in the single databases. To schedule and execute jobs on single databases we have a feature called elastic job agent. This feature is used for scheduling and execute jobs on a single database, all the databases in the server, or on all the databases in an elastic pool.

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