Not much to do here in Tokyo while waiting for the Bangkok flight except read and blog, and I've already done enough reading for one day on the flight here – so that leaves blogging! Here's an interesting case that I got involved in on SQLServerCentral (here's the original thread, linked here with permission of [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
SQL 2005 SP2 maintenance plan bug masking corruption
Posted on: April 15, 2009 11:54 pm
Is running repair on msdb safe?
Posted on: March 25, 2009 9:02 am
Just saw this on a forum – running REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS on msdb to cope with corruption. Yes, this will work but it's certainly not safe and something I'd only recommend as a last resort. Here's why: msdb stores your backup history and your Agent jobs. REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS works by usually "delete what's broken and fix up all [...]
Easy monitoring of high-severity errors: create Agent alerts
Posted on: February 23, 2009 10:34 am
In my previous post today I talked about error 825 and how you should have an Agent alert set up to catch it when it happens. There are two ways you can set up Agent alerts – using SSMS or using the stored-proc sp_add_alert. In a post from April 2008 I showed how to create an [...]
A little-known sign of impending doom: error 825
Posted on: February 23, 2009 10:15 am
There are two pretty well-known I/O errors – 823, and 824 – but there's also one called 825 which most DBAs do*not* know about, and definitely should. From SQL Server 2005 onwards, if you ever see an 823 or 824, SQL Server has actually tried that I/O a total of 4 times before it finally [...]
Conference Questions Pot-Pourri #7: How to create Agent alerts
Posted on: April 19, 2008 3:05 pm
Many times I've been asked to do a blog post about creating Agent alerts, and given that today I demo'd it as part of our Accidental DBA workshop at Connections, it seemed a good time to do the blog post too! I demo this in the context of alerting a DBA when an 823 or [...]
CHECKDB From Every Angle: When did DBCC CHECKDB last run successfully?
Posted on: March 13, 2008 8:32 pm
This came up several times during the week so I thought it was about time to blog about it. One of the new features we put into SQL Server 2005 was storing the last time that DBCC CHECKDB completed successfully (called the last-known good time). What does successfully mean? This is the catch – if [...]
How does daylight savings time affect disaster recovery?
Posted on: October 6, 2007 5:49 pm
It’s common knowledge that SQL Server copes with daylight savings time (DST) correctly so why should you care? Well, it’s not so common knowledge that at the end of DST when the clocks go back an hour (always at 02:00 in the U.S.), SQL Agent essentially pauses for an hour (in at least SS2000 onwards). This [...]
