Wayne Sheffield

My blog about SQL Server

SSMS 17.3 SSMS 17.3 was just released (download link), and it has a couple of new features worthy of mention: Import Flat File Wizard XEvent Profiler Import Flat File Wizard If you’ve worked with SQL Server for very long, you have most likely needed to import flat files from time to time. SSMS 17.3 utilizes […]

It’s not stable until Service Pack 1… Are you at a company that doesn’t install a new version of SQL Server until Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been released? Well, you need not wait for SP1 any more. Because there’s not going to be any more service packs. Microsoft just announced their “Modern Servicing Module […]

Announcing Seattle Freecon 2017 Are you going to the PASS Summit this year? (and if not… why not?) Are you coming in to Seattle on or before Tuesday? Are you not attending any of the wonderful precons at the PASS Summit on Tuesday? Then I have a great deal for you. Come attend the Seattle […]

In a recent post, I introduced you to how to work with the registry directly from within SQL Server. Continuing this theme, this post provides an example situation where you would do so. In this example, we will want to configure SQL Server to enable a few trace flags (TF) when SQL Server starts. Specifically, […]

There is a lot of information within the Windows registry. Sometimes, it would sure be nice to work with the registry within your T-SQL scripts. As it turns out, there are a bunch of undocumented extended stored procedures that do just this. A listing of these procedures are: As you can see, there are two […]

In order for your SQL Server instance to run optimally, there are many SQL Server best practices that you need to follow. The SQL Health Check that you can have us perform on your instances looks at many of these. SQL Server 2016, which at the time of this writing is in a Release Candidate […]

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… and it also mentioned that you need to be sure that you enable Trace Flag 3604 in order to see the results. So, two things immediately jumped […]