Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Monday Monitor Tips–Finding CUs for My Instance

    How can I quickly get a CU patch for a system that’s out of date? I’ll discuss that situation.

    You might think you get to patch every instance every few months, and you may be able to. But most of us have laggards in any decent-sized estate. Someone always wants to avoid patching, or skip patching on the day you’ve scheduled every other system.

    This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

    Tracking Versions

    The Estate page in Redgate Monitor contains quite a few different views of your entire estate. This section is designed to aggregate data across all the systems you are monitoring. If I look at https://monitor.red-gate.com/Estate/Versions, I see this as a default.

    2024-08_0041

    This gives me an overview of what SQL Server versions I’m monitoring. As you can see, our test estate has a mix of versions, from 2008R2 through 2022 and one Managed Instance. The counts are in the pie chart, and we can see how many are up to date in the bars to the right of each version. As you can see, lots of our estate needs patching.

    I can also see at a glance for each version that the latest update is and its release date. The download link is a quick way to download the latest patch from Microsoft. We maintain this list and Redgate Monitor will update it on a regular basis.

    When I scroll down, I see the details of individual instances. These are grouped, though I can change that with the toggle in the upper left. For each instance, I have the name and the major version,

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    The current status and the latest patch are listed next to each other, with an icon and color coding that let’s me know I need to upgrade (yellow up arrow) or I’m patched (green checkmark). I once again have the latest patch, linked to the MS article as well as text that let’s me know how out of date I am.  You can see these patches are a month old. Auditors are potentially OK with that.

    2024-08_0043

    However, for my 2012 instances, I’m way out of date. No excuse for that. We keep these firewalled and protected, and they are available here only for demonstration purposes.

    2024-08_0045

    To the right of this we have our support dates. If a date is past, we mark it with a triangle to let you know that you have unsupported versions. That may or may not be an issue for your organization.

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    Summary

    This section of the Estate tab isn’t something I expect DBAs or sysadmins to check often, but I would schedule a reminder to do this quarterly. Knowing the state of our patching process is important, especially when there are security updates being released. We have had a few in the last year for SQL Server, and it is important to patch and apply those.

    Seeing not only the status, but having an easy download link makes this a very handy tab that I wish I’d have had in quite a few jobs during the 90s and early 2000s. If you haven’t checked your estate tab in Redgate Monitor, you might do that today.

    Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

  • A New Word: Fensiveness

    fensiveness – n. a knee-jerk territorial reaction  when a friend displays a casual interest in one of your obsessions.

    I think that some of us have some fensiveness about the things that we deeply care about if we worry about the friend taking a bigger interest or having more success when we do.

    I know I’ve felt fensiveness when I find a new game on mobile that I might enjoy and my wife sees it and is interested. Mostly because she’s a much better gamer and puts me to shame if we were really competing.

    We aren’t, but there have been times I’ve worked for a period of time to get to Level 100, and then my wife starts playing and is all of sudden 100 levels past me in a short time.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Saving Emergency Space on my Laptop

    With my new laptop, one of the things I realized I’d forgotten to do in setup is reserve some space. I wrote about this years ago, but I wanted to ensure I always had space in the event of an emergency.

    Creating Placeholders

    In the previous post, I linked to the contig utility from Microsoft. I downloaded this and then copied the new 64-bit utility to my c:\utilities folder, which is where I keep a lot of generic stuff I run.

    Then I copied my old command and updated the exe call.

    However, I also built a quick batch file to give me 20GB of saved space. I called it create20gb.cmd and it contains this code:

    contig64 -n Hold1.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold2.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold3.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold4.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold5.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold6.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold7.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold8.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold9.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold10.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold11.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold12.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold13.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold14.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold15.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold16.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold17.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold18.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold19.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold20.place 1073741824

    I made a c:\hold folder and dropped the cmd file in there. I then ran it. Here are the results:

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    Now if I find myself running low on space, I can go in here and delete a few files and get some space back.

    I recommend this for all machines, since I’ve run into the space problem so often, usually at a time when I’m stressed and I need space quickly. This makes it easy to get a bit of space back.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #178–A Recent Technical Problem

    tsqltuesdayThis month we have a good invitation from Deepthi Goguri, where she asks us about a technical problem. I think most of are technical people and we solve problems regularly. This is the same type of thing I ask people to blog on regularly, documenting their career.

    It’s a great way to prepare for future interviews as well.

    If you don’t blog, this is a good chance to start. Go to WordPress.com and get a free one. Then post on this topic.

    If you want to host, ping me.

    A Recent Technical Issue

    My blog is full of stuff I run into, or my customers run into. I try to post short pieces on the things I’ve been dealing with. Quite a few of my posts are on Redgate products, sometimes me digging into a technical problem and finding a way to accomplish the requirement.

    One of the more interesting ones recently was getting my Docker Desktop setup on a new machine. While installed the system was easy, I had to dig around and research a bit to try and understand how to use volumes. The documentation can be sparse, and it took some experimenting to decide that mapping specific folders in my compose file rather than trying to create permanent volumes was a better solution.

    I also had to experiment a bit with a few settings and paths to decide that I needed a specific place on my disk to hold all my data, which makes it easy to manage over time. I also had to make the decision on naming the containers. It’s easy to lose track of ports, and it’s sometimes hard to remember how to get the port, so to keep it simple, I used naming that has the port name in the container name.

    I wrote about the final process, which you can check out if you want to learn more.