SQL Back Door – DAC (Dedicated Administrator Connection)

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.

GUI Method

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

If you prefer the T-SQL method

USE master

GO

sp_configure ‘remote admin connections’, 1

GO

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

How to log onto the server using DAC

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.

1. You don’t belong in the SysAdmin group
2. A SysAdmin is already logged onto the server
   

As always, I hope this helps.

Microsoft Update Catalog

If you want to find out if you’re on the latest Service Pack for Microsoft SQL Server here’s a direct link to the Microsoft Update Catalog. The link will take you to MS SQL 2014. If you want other version just do a search for your version.

Fail-Safe

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.

FREE SQL System Reports!

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!

 

SQL Server Alert System: ‘Severity Level 020: Error In Current Process – High’

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

• Named Pipes Provider: The specified network name is no longer available.
•  

  A fatal error occurred while reading the input stream from the network. The session will be terminated

• The prelogin packet used to open the connection is structurally invalid; the connection has been closed. Please contact the vendor of the client library. [CLIENT: <named pipe>]
• Length specified in network packet payload did not match number of bytes read; the connection has been closed. Please contact the vendor of the client library.
• SSIS Error Code DTS_E_INDUCEDTRANSFORMFAILUREONERROR.  The “OLE DB Destination.Inputs[OLE DB Destination Input]” failed because error code 0xC020907B occurred, and the error row disposition on “OLE DB Destination.Inputs[OLE DB Destination Input]” specifies failure on error.
• Communication link failure

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.

Modify Column Data Type

Syntax:
USE [YourDatabaseName]
GO
ALTER TABLE YourTableName
ALTER COLUMN column_name datatype;

Senario:
I have a database call Afterowl with a table call Birds. In my Birds table, I want to change TypeOfBird data type from NVARCHAR(10) to VARCHAR(100).

Example:
USE Afterowl
GO
ALTER TABLE Birds
ALTER COLUMN TypeOfBird VARCHAR(100)

List Calendar Dates

I use this to bounce against my weekly ETL’s to make sure that every day of the week data is captured. This helps me quickly identify a Calendar date with no ETL date which means no data was pulled.

DECLARE @start_date DATETIME= ‘2017-01-01’;
DECLARE @end_date DATETIME= GETDATE();
WITH CalendarDates
AS (
SELECT CAST(@start_date AS DATE) AS Calendar_Day
UNION ALL
SELECT DATEADD(DAY, 1, Calendar_Day)
FROM CalendarDates
WHERE Calendar_Day < @end_date)

SELECT Calendar_Day,
DATENAME(dw, Calendar_Day) AS Day_of_Week,
DATENAME(week, Calendar_Day) AS Week_Number
FROM CalendarDates OPTION(MAXRECURSION 0);

 

LIKE Regular Expression

Here’s a great trick to find specific patterns for a column. The LIKE CLAUSE can be use as a RegEx

Here’s a link to LIKE from Microsoft.

Using Wildcard Characters As Literals

You can use the wildcard pattern matching characters as literal characters. To use a wildcard character as a literal character, enclose the wildcard character in brackets. The following table shows several examples of using the LIKE keyword and the [ ] wildcard characters.

Symbol	Meaning
LIKE ‘5[%]’	5%
LIKE ‘[_]n’	_n
LIKE ‘[a-cdf]’	a, b, c, d, or f
LIKE ‘[-acdf]’	-, a, c, d, or f
LIKE ‘[ [ ]’	[
LIKE ‘]’	]
LIKE ‘abc[_]d%’	abc_d and abc_de
LIKE ‘abc[def]’	abcd, abce, and abcf

 

In this example, I want to find all user names that starts with the letter “S” and is follow by numbers 0-9.

 

SELECT Text File using OpenRowSet

Here’s a simple query to directly SELECT a Text File.

HDR = Header Row. If YES, that means your first row is a header.

SELECT *
FROM OPENROWSET(‘Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0’, ‘Text;Database=E:\;HDR=YES’, ‘SELECT * FROM Log.txt’)

If you need the Microsfot ACE OLEDB 12 driver, please refer to  Microsoft Jet OLEDB 12

 

Why use SQLCMD

What’s wrong with using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)? Nothing! What’s wrong with you! Well, I’m in a hurry.

As much as I love GNR Patience, I don’t have any… well not so much of it. Thanks Smart Phone era.

I always use SQLCMD when SSIS is not available– not all of my customers install SSIS along with SQL. I once had a project where I had to scan through terabytes of files to find certain image files. Once the files were found, it would immediately write the path to the database. Since this had to be performed and completed over the weekend, I ran hundreds instances of my C# application to seek out the files.

So here’s how it works

In the command prompt (cmd.exe), run sqlcmd /? and you’ll see the following

There’s a lot of options and the ones I frequently use are
-S Server Name
-E Trusted Connection
-Q Query

In the example below, I’m querying a table, however you can always call a stored procedure to INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/SELECT your data instead of writing out the query– SP is safer

I hope this gives you some insight as to why/when you would use SQLCMD