Maintenance

Rajendra Gupta
System default - 5 PM to 8 AM

Azure SQL Database Maintenance Window

July 7, 2021 by

Azure SQL Database and SQL Managed instance are Microsoft offerings for PaaS SQL Server in cloud infrastructure. In the case of a traditional on-premises SQL Server, at certain times, we require database system downtime to perform specific operations such as hardware upgrades, OS and SQL Server patching. In a critical production database system, it is challenging to get downtime and schedule these activities.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
set database to single user mode

ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER statement in SQL Server

June 7, 2021 by

In this article, we are going to explore the purpose of the ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER statement. The ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER is used to put the database in single-user mode. When any database is in single-user mode, the new user cannot connect to the database. However, the users that are already connected to the database do not get disconnected.

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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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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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Nisarg Upadhyay
The Backup of is compressed and split into multiple files

Compress and split SQL database backups using WinRar

August 4, 2020 by

Recently, we have received a strange request from our customer. They want us to set up a schedule a backup job that generates a backup of SQL database, compress the backup file in multiple compressed archive files (WinRAR files.) We tried to explain to the customer that the SQL Server native backups are capable of compressing the backup file, and it can split a large and compressed backup into multiple backup files. But they insisted us to use the WinRAR software to compress and split the backup.

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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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Aveek Das
Grafana Dashboard Demo

Overview of the Grafana Dashboard with SQL

June 2, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to demonstrate how to set up Grafana Dashboard for real-time analytics or data monitoring purposes. Grafana is an open-source, cross-platform analytics service tool that can be used to fetch data from several data sources, and then the data can be visualized in a much intuitive way in the form of bars and graphs. This is quite a useful feature for the DevOps or the IT team as it can make their job easier to find abnormalities or spikes in the production environment by observing the logs generated.

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Jignesh Raiyani
New database with Database File Size

How to determine free space and file size for SQL Server databases

March 9, 2020 by

In this article, we will discuss the actual database file size and free space in the database file size with the help of monitoring script and shrink solutions. While creating a database initial size of the database files (Data File and Log File) can be defined by us, with the Autogrowth and MAXSIZE parameter. The initial size will be the same as the model database if by chance user forgot to define the initial size parameter while creating a database or do the same intentionally.

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