Wayne Sheffield

My blog about SQL Server

Browsing Posts in SQL

Target. Home Depot. NASA. U.S. Army. Anthem. Wall Street Journal. MarketWired. Ashley Madison. What do they all have in common? They are all recent victims of cyber-attacks – several of these are confirmed to involve SQL Injection. Even though the exact method used to penetrate the other systems has not been released, experts believe that […]

In a prior post, I shared a script that will take a running trace and show you the XE events that it relates to, and what columns are available within those XE events. Specifically, this was for converting a deadlock trace into an XE session; however the process is the same for converting any trace […]

In this brave, new world of Extended Events (XE, XEvents), I find myself with a mixture of scripts for troubleshooting issues – some use XE, and some use traces. We’ve all been told that XE is a much better system (it is much more lightweight, causing less of an issue with the server). In fact, […]

I was recently reading this msdn article on Ghost Records, and it mentioned that you could get the number of ghost records on a page with DBCC DBTABLE… it also mentioned that you need to be sure that you enable Trace Flag 3604 to see the results. So, two things immediately jumped out at me. […]

While you may not need to worry about the physical location of a row very often, every so often the need comes up. In a few of my earlier posts (here), I have needed this information to prove a point. This post shows how to identify a row’s physical location. It will also show the […]

In several of my last few blog posts, I’ve shared several methods of getting internal information from a database by using the DBCC PAGE command and utilizing the “WITH TABLERESULTS” option to be allowed to automate this process for further processing. This post will also do this, but in this case, we’ll be using it […]

In a prior blog post, I demonstrated how using DBCC PAGE can be automated by using the “WITH TABLERESULTS” option. In this post, we will continue with another look at how this can be done. On a nice wintry day, your city ended up being covered in several feet of snow. During the course of […]

How SQL Server uses Windows Virtual Accounts and local groups Managed Service Accounts (MSAs) and Virtual Accounts were introduced in Windows 7 / Windows 2008R2 (link). Installations of SQL Server 2012 and newer will utilize the Virtual Accounts. SQL Server 2008 / 2008R2 installations use a combination of the local groups and Virtual Accounts, and […]

Way back in 2006, Paul Randal documented DBCC PAGE on his Microsoft blog at //blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2006/06/10/625659.aspx. In his post, you will notice that in order to return the output from DBCC PAGE to the screen, you need to enable trace flag 3604 first. The above blog post shows a few examples of the results and utilizing […]

It’s that time of the month… the time when all of the T-SQL bloggers have a party and blog about a specific topic. Unfortunately, it’s been a few months since I’ve written a T-SQL Tuesday post. I’m hopeful that I can use this post to get back in the groove and participate in this monthly […]