Ever wanted to find out what was happening when SQL Server crashed? Your investigation should also include reviewing the SQL Server activities much like what profiler would do. SQL Server 2008 (Including SQL2K5) out of the box comes with a default trace enabled. This trace keeps track of configuration changes, process level information and other information that can be very helpful for troubleshooting SQL Server related issues.

Post By: Alberto Ortoll Orellana (Bellevue College, WA)

Clustering is an Operating System (OS) Server based technology used to provide failover capabilities, and it is inherently redundant. Microsoft SQL Server is, more specifically, an application server that runs on top of the OS. There are some additional steps involved with setting up SQL Server in a Windows Server configured as a cluster. Server Clusters are composed of 2 or more servers, each server is called a Nodes. On a 2-Node cluster configuration, the first node is active and the second node is passive, it is common to refer to this configuration as a Cluster in Active/Passive mode.

What if you have 100's of SQL Server 2005 in your company and you would like to configure all the servers based on some standards (Example: Surface Area Configuration Properties). Take an example you have just installed a SQL Server and also have configured the surface area configuration (SAC) for that SQL Server based on your standards and now you would like to replicate this configuration to 100's and 1000's of other SQL Servers in your company. How would you do that?

Post by: Silin Kuang (Bellevue College, WA)

In nowadays, our lives have heavily relied on information that is available for us.  To make sure database high availability, in another word, to make sure the information is available when you need it, has made a DBA’s role crucial in an organization.  As a consumer, you use the most updated product information available on the website to make a purchase decision.  As a doctor, you use the patient’s information available for you to judge the operation procedures for a surgery.  As a marketing analyst, you use the sales transaction history available to make marketing forecast and financial reports.  With the huge amount of data being added to the database every second, how does DBA’s ensure database high availability?  This article demonstrates the major high availability technologies in Microsoft SQL server 2005 and 2008.

Starting with SQL Server 2005, putting user database in EMERGENCY mode is now a supported and documented feature (unlike SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7.0 where you had to change the status of SYSDATABASES)

One of the best features of SQL Server 2005 & 2008 that I like is that it lets you perform restore on portions of the database which is damaged and yet keep the database ONLINE. This was not possible with earlier versions of SQL Server. In SQL Server 2005/2008, you no longer have to take the database offline to perform a restore on a small portion of a database. Once you have identified the pages that need to be restored you have two options:

1) You can perform a PAGE level restore (My recommendation is to do this when you have small number of pages)

2) You can perform a FILE level restore (My recommendation is to do this when you have large number of pages)

Did you know that prior to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft used to ship an executable called "REBUILDM.EXE" that would help you rebuild the Master database? The world has changed and so has SQL Server and REBUILDM.EXE tool.