There are times when you want to delay a script such as sending yourself a reminders or to run a job/stored procedure/etc.
BEGIN
WAITFOR TIME ’01:10′;
PRINT ‘This message will print at 1:10 am’;
END;
BEGIN
WAITFOR DELAY ’01:00′;
PRINT ‘This message will print in one hour’;
END;
There will be a time or more in your life where SQL Server becomes unresponsive and stops working. You can try to remote desktop into the server with no luck– or take the Rambo route and hard restart the server or have IT do it. This is where DAC (Dedicated Administrator Connection) comes into play. DAC allows one back door SA connection into the SQL Server. To use DAC, you first have to turn it on and here’s how you do it.
First open up SQL Management Studio
Step 1. Right click on your server
Step 2. Click on Facets
Once the Facets windows show up do the following
Step 1. Under the Facet drop-down-list, pick Surface Area Configuration
Step 2. Select RemoteDacEnabled and from the drop-down-list pick True
Step 3. Click OK
That’s all to it
USE master
GO
sp_configure ‘remote admin connections’, 1
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO
Step 1: Open up SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
Step 2: On the tool bar, click on Database Engine Query
Step 3: In the Server Name box, type in ADMIN: before your server name.
Step 4: Click Connect
Once connected, you can then troubleshoot your SQL Services. If you can’t log in, it means two thing.
As always, I hope this helps.
When your SSIS package fails, wouldn’t it be nice to receive an email with as much details as possible. Here are steps to setup this hidden gem.
Step 1. Setup the Event Handlers
Step 2. Add the Send Mail Task
Step 3. Setup the Email connection
Select SMTP and click Add…
Fill in the Name and SMTP server and click OK.
Step 2. Open up the Send Mail Task by double clicking on it
Click on the Expressions tab
You’ll want to do this step for the Message Source and Subject
Copy and Paste these to the respective Expression. When you’re done, click OK.
Message Source
“Machine Name: ” + (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::MachineName] + “\r\n” +
“Package Name: ” + (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::PackageName] + “\r\n” +
“User Name: ” + (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::UserName] + “\r\n” +
“Source Name: ” + (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::SourceName] + “\r\n” +
“Source Description: ” + (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::SourceDescription] + “\r\n” +
“Error Code: “+ (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::ErrorCode] + “\r\n” +
“Error Description: ” + (DT_STR, 2000,1252) @[System::ErrorDescription] + “\r\n”
Subject
“** Error Msg from OnError Event Handler *** ” + ” SSIS Package Name: [” + @[System::PackageName] + “] ” + “; Machine Name: ” + @[System::MachineName]
Here’s a look at how it looks like when an error occurs. You’ll get an email telling you which Package and Task failed. Keep in mind that you no longer need to go to SQL Job History, SSIS Catalog, Event Viewer to view the errors. The errors will come to you via email! Sweet Jesus!
As always, I hope this helps.
There are times when you’re on vacation, kids soccer games, family outing, church, etc where you’re inaccessible. Thanks to Murphy’s law something bad will happen to the database server and alerts will fire off and you won’t receive those notifications because you’re enjoying life for once. This is where you want to enable Fail-Safe– a.k.a. your backup buddy.
As TechNet puts it, “when things go wrong with SQL Server notifications, operators are not notified and problems might not be corrected in a timely manner. As a precaution, you might want to designate a fail-safe operator. A fail-safe operator is notified when a SQL Server Agent cannot access system tables in the msdb database (which is where operator definitions and notification lists are stored), when all pager notifications to designated operators have failed, or when the designated operators are off duty (as defined in the pager schedule). ”
The steps to enable this tucked away feature is as follows.
Open up Management Studio -> Right Click on SQL Server Agent -> Click on Properties
Click on “Alert System”
Tick the “Enable mail profile” as you’ll need this for the Fail-Safe to work.
I’m assuming you already have a Mail Profile setup so at this point, select your Mail System/Profile from the drop-down-list. Once this is done, the Fail-Safe operator will highlight.
Tick on “Enable fail-safe operator” and select your Operator from the drop-down-list. Then Tick on how you want that operator to receive the messages and then Click OK
As always, I hope this helps.
Are you a DBA that has no funding for fancy SQL System Health Reports like RedGate, SQLTools, Foglight, SentryOne, etc? Do you hate looking at dmv queries because there are so many of them to remember? Well did you know that SQL Management Studios comes with System Health Reports? Below are steps to get System Health Reports at no cost.
To view the System Reports
Right click on “your Server” -> Reports -> Standard Reports -> “select a report”
To view the Database Specific Reports
Right click on “your Database” -> Reports -> Standard Reports -> “select a report”
Each report can be expanded for detail information.
As always, hope this helps!
I get this very vague Alert in a weekly basis and it was driving me nuts. I reached out to the IT Network/OS for months to see if they could pin down the issue and were not able to find anything on their logs. I provided an Event Handler Email Task to the developers to put inside their SSIS Packages and when I would get Severity Level 020 Alerts, I would now see their Packages. The common errors are
A fatal error occurred while reading the input stream from the network. The session will be terminated
It did not matter when the Job ran (on a schedule, manual, Visual Studio Data Tools), it would still randomly fail. Most of these SSIS are straight forward where they pull 5 million records from Teradata to SQL– Just a straight SELECT * FROM Table (these tables are the final product of an ETL performed in Teradata). Then one day, I get a new error “Communication link failure” so I Googled it and here’s where it lead me to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/942861/general-network-error-communication-link-failure-or-a-transport-level
I ran the command “Netsh int tcp show global” to see the following
In lamens term, Receive-Side Scaling is like the waiter directing traffic at a Food Buffet. The line can only move as fast as the waiter can find you a table. If you disable Receive-Side Scaling, it’s Free For All. You have eyes and the stranger next to you have eyes and you both can find an empty table without the help of the waiter therefore there’s no wait or less wait. Here’s a link to a more technical term https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/network/introduction-to-receive-side-scaling
After I disabled Received-Side Scaling (Network Adapter -> Properties -Configure.. -> Advanced -> and increased the SQL (Properties -> Advance) Remote Login Timeout from 20 to 35, the SSIS Packages began to run without Severity Level 020.
I hope this helps someone that is experiencing the same issue.
