Voice of the DBA

Tag: administration

  • Customizing SSMS–Results

    This is a short series on some customizations in SSMS to make it visually more appealing.

    As a presenter, I’ve learned how to change the way Management Studio (SSMS) looks to make it easier for people to see the screen on a projector. I had wrongly assumed that so many people knew many of these tricks, which is a poor attitude on my part. That should be especially apparent as I saw a presentation recently where the speaker didn’t know how to make things easier to see.

    In a previous post I talked about changing the query font size. In this post we’ll look at result sizes.

    The Defaults

    This is what I see, and it’s not easy to read.

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    The results are much smaller than the query itself. How can we change this and make things easier to read?

    I wrote about one way: using results to text. This works well, but it isn’t the best solution for everyone, and you still want to change the size of your results. The technique I’ll show you works for that as well.

    Customization

    If you go to the Tools | Options menu, in the Fonts tab as I showed in the last post, you’ll find there’s a drop down titled “Show settings for:” at the top. If you select Grid results, you can change the font settings.

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    The default is 8, and I usually up that a bit.

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    Once that is done, you click OK, and get this note:

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    Make sure your tabs are saved, since you need to restart SSMS. Once you do, your results will be much easier to read.

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    Note that in the drop down for settings, there is an item for “Results to text”. If you change that, your text results will be larger.

  • Disabling Resource Governor

    I had known that the Resource Governor is always running in modern versions of SQL Server. It’s core to the operation of the SQLOS, though it can’t be used to do anything unless it is enabled.

    You can read more about it if you have Enterprise Edition, and I’ve thought it was a good start to controlling and throttling the resources inside SQL Server. I’d like to see it expanded, and I do like the CAP addition in 2012.

    However I wasn’t aware you could prevent someone from enabling Resource Governor. Apparently you can, as shown in this blog: Disabling Resource Governor permanently (somewhat). Amit Bansal shows that if you set trace flag 8040, the Resource Governor cannot be enabled. This prevents changes by junior administrators, developers, etc. that might not be aware of the consequences of their actions.

    Personally for me, I’m not sure I like this. To me this is a case where you don’t have trust among your staff, or good communication, or perhaps something else. None of those are good situations.

    I don’t know that I’d ever use this, but you can read Amit’s post for more details.

    Note that this doesn’t remove Resource Governor, and your DAC still resides in the internal pool, which always has guaranteed resources.

  • Development, Operations, or Accounting

    These kinds of problems should not happen in the cloud.
    These kinds of problems should not happen in the cloud.

    I think the idea of a platform of services, such as Windows Azure provides, is a great idea. I’d love to be able to stop worrying about hardware in many cases, and even skip some of the infrastructure of networking and managing specific machines. Just having services that I could deploy to that run my database and code, would smooth out some of the hassles of Information Technology in many companies.

    However the services have to work and work well.

    I’ve had concerns with AWS and their outages, though Netflix has run a thriving business on that platform and learned to work within that service. I think the Azure platform is similar, and they’ve had a few outages, I do have concerns over where their outages have occurred. There was an expired certificate, then supposedly maintenance, later revealed to be heat issues.

    These issues bother me. Some are unavoidable, but some aren’t. I’m particularly concerned about the expiration of security certificates. This happened again recently to Azure, and it shouldn’t. I don’t know if this was a problem with the development groups that build applications using certificates, the operations groups that administer systems, or the accounting groups that might need to purchase new certificates, but part of what the “cloud” should bring is expertise and better qualities of service from the people doing the work.

    I can hire semi-competent people that don’t pay attention to details and suffer my own outages. At least then I know I’m to blame and I can replace them. However moving to a service like Azure or AWS means giving up a lot of control. If I can’t count on better services than I get in-house, I’m not sure there are many advantages to moving.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • The Command Shell

    Security holes are all around. Are there any in xp_cmdshell?
    Security holes are all around. Are there any in xp_cmdshell?

    Recently I heard a few people arguing over the use of xp_cmdshell in a particular situation. One person was adamant that there was a security risk in using this feature. Many of you probably feel the same way, and even the SQL Server platform has recognized there could be dangers with this feature and has it disabled by default, as part of the secure by default installation.

    However the security around this procedure has been improved over the years. Non system administrators cannot execute xp_cmdshell by default. Administrators can open up access using a proxy account, but this requires specific configuration changes by administrators. This means that a lot of the danger of using xp_cmdshell for administrative tasks has been removed.

    Or has it? This Friday I wanted to poll you and find out what you think. Many of you are creative in how you use SQL Server and will think of possibilities that many of us would not consider.

    Is there a security risk in allowing xp_cmdshell to be used by members of the sysadmin role?

    I’m not looking for potential issues if a proxy account exists. Instead I’m asking if there are real dangers in allowing administrators to use this tool? I assume you trust your administrators and they will not maliciously use this tool to cause issues in your SQL Server. Let us know how you feel this week.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.