How Well Do You Know Your SQL Servers?

This Is Not An Exit Interview

Talking to lots of different types of people about SQL Server gives you a pretty good idea about what you’ll find on their SQL Servers

• Stuff they didn’t know they should change
• Stuff they knew they should change
• Stuff they thought they changed
• Stuff they changed, but then…

The last one is tough to sort out. Most likely, lots of people have enough access to make changes.

Ditto in those environments, there’s no change management, no monitoring (or at least none that tracks settings changes), and it’s not like SQL Server is set up out of the box to notify you when someone changes something.

Here are some examples:

• Someone turned off the CHECKDB job
• Someone changed the log backup schedule to not run at night
• Someone changed a parallelism setting
• Someone changes fill factor

Questions For You

• Do you monitor these things?
• Does your monitoring tool monitor these things?
• Do you have a favorite tool to check these things?

If you don’t, and you like PowerShell, check out Rob Sewell’s Pester checks. If you prefer T-SQL, there’s always sp_Blitz.

If you’re totally lost about what to do, drop me a line. These are the kinds of things I love to help people with.

Thanks for reading!

Going Further

If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.