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If you spend much time at all in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), you’ve no doubt had trouble figuring out which query tab is the one you need.

Many DBAs and SQL Devs find themselves (despite best intentions and New Years Resolutions) with dozens of tabs open, and many of them unsaved.

Thanks to Daniel Maenle (LI|T)’s comment on a LinkedIn post, I went digging and now my life is better!

Pin Important Queries

I have some saved queries I leave open all the time for various reasons. As an example:

When I open a few new queries, typically in a frenzied troubleshooting session, it looks like this:

Yours is different by default. Note the highlighted bits. My saved queries I always use are “pinned tabs”. The Second row is New Queries that I have not yet saved.

You can change this here, with immediate effect (Tools, Options):

Hope this helps you organize your SSMS and brings you a few minutes of sanity!

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Follow @Dallas_DBAs

This happened:

• 3am – spam call
• 4am – spam call
• 7am – check voice mail…it wasn’t spam. It was a dormant customer with no on-call agreement
• 9:30am – save customer’s server and sanity
• 4pm – database back online, team happy, and customer is working to get approval for the Pocket DBA™ service 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Follow @Dallas_DBAs

Dallas DBAs is proud to be sponsoring the May 2021 GroupBy Conference, Americas DBA track

GroupBy is a different sort of conference as it has been online since it began in 2019 (Thanks Brent! (b|t)) Sessions are voted on by the community with the top vote getters being accepted.

As part of our Virtual Group sponsorship we get to present a session, so we asked the first-runner up in the vote tally to “guest present” for us.

Jeff Moden (L), Mr. “NO RBAR” himself will be presenting “Black Arts” Index Maintenance – GUIDs v.s. Fragmentation – They’re not the problem… WE ARE!” at 22:00 UTC on May 25.

This will be a roughly 30 second “About Dallas DBAs” bit, and the rest is all Jeff.

Session Abstract:

This is NOT your typical presentation on the fragmentation problems of Random GUIDs. No… Instead we’re going to DESTROY THE MYTH OF RANDOM GUID FRAGMENTATION.

In one of the most ironic/heterodoxical turns of knowledge you’re ever likely to experience, we’ll see how THE USE OF RANDOM GUIDS CAN ACTUALLY PREVENT FRAGMENTATION! In the end, you’ll witness the results of some simple testing that clearly demonstrate that you can easily insert literally MILLIONs of rows into a Random GUID clustered index with almost no page splits (not even supposed “good” ones) and LESS THAN 1% Logical fragmentation!

We’ll identify the real problem and the seriously effective yet incredibly simple two-part fix for it. In the process, we’ll prove that Random GUIDs actually behave in a manner like most people expect a good index to behave, especially in but not limited to high performance OLTP environments as well as the benefits of doing so.

We’ll also learn how to use a new tool that I created (included in the ZIP file) to ACTUALLY SEE what an index looks like at the page level for all pages in a single graph.

Then, we’ll use that tool to lay waste to what people are currently calling “Best Practice” index maintenance. We’ll literally see what REORGANIZE does to an index at the page level and why it’s one of the very worst things you can do to your Random GUID and many other types of indexes even if you’re limited to the Standard Edition of SQL Server. We also prove that REORGANIZE CAUSES ORDERS-OF-MAGNITUDE WORSE TRANSACTION LOG FILE USAGE than REBUILD especially for Random GUIDs.

As interesting and totally necessary sidebars, we’ll also see how the use of ever-increasing index keys could be (and frequently is) a major source of many of your fragmentation problems and we’ll also see that NEWSEQUENTIALID may NOT the answer that you’re looking for.

See you there (virtually)!

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Follow @Dallas_DBAs

SQL Server Security Update: January 12, 2021

Microsoft has issued an important security update that affects all installations of SQL Server 2012-2019. This security update addresses an elevation of privilege vulnerability which can allow data to be sent over a network to an affected SQL Server instance that might cause code to run against the SQL Server process if a certain extended event is enabled. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4583468/kb4583468-microsoft-sql-server-elevation-of-privilege-vulnerability)

The ”certain Extended Event” has not been disclosed at this time.

You can read the MSRC Security Update Guide document CVE-2021-1636 for more detailed information, and to learn which specific versions of SQL Server are affected by this vulnerability. NOTE: If you are running an instance of SQL Server 2012 or higher and do not find your version number listed, then your SQL Server version is no longer supported and needs an update to the latest Service Pack and/or Cumulative Update.

We recommend all SQL Server users apply this security update during the next available maintenance window to patch this vulnerability.

I’m running a poll on both LinkedIN and Twitter asking the same question.  Adding it here to see how the responses vary with each audience:

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Thanks for responding. Feel free to comment in the comment section!

Kevin3NF