Surveillance 185 Summary 202 Chapter 8: Finding data corruption 204 Causes of corruption 204 Consequences of corruption 205 Fighting corruption 206 Seeking out corruption 224 Summary 228 vi ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rodney Landrum has been working with SQL Server technologies for longer than he can remember (he turned 40 in May of 2009, so his memory is going). He writes regularly about many SQL Server technologies, including Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. He has authored three books on Reporting Services. He is a regular contributor to SQL Server Magazine and Simple-Talk, the latter of which he sporadically blogs on about SQL and his plethora of geek tattoos. His day job finds him overseeing the health and well-being of a large SQL Server infrastructure in Pensacola, Florida. He swears he owns the expression "Working with Databases on a Day to Day Basis" and anyone who disagrees is itching to arm wrestle. Rodney is also a SQL Server MVP. ABOUT THE TECHNICAL REVIEWER Shawn McGehee is a full-time professional DBA and a part-time amateur developer from Pensacola, Florida. He is very active with the local SQL users’ group in Pensacola and helps organize / speaks regularly at their events. Shawn is also a contributing writer to popular SQL websites such as Simple Talk and SQL Server Central. He was also a co-author of the book "Pro SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services." vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone involved in the making of this book, peripherally and personally, but first and foremost Karla…my love, who has been with me, spurred me on and understood when I needed a fishing or beer respite through 5 books now. I love you. To all my kids who also sacrificed during the writing of this book. Megan, Ethan, Brendan and Taylor. Well, OK, Ethan did not sacrifice so much, but he did help me understand that "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a legitimate sentence. Thanks to my Mom and Dad, as always. I love you. There will still be a novel, I promise; just not a Western. Sorry, Mom. Thanks also to Shawn McGehee, my good friend and DBA colleague, who tech-edited the book. It is much better for it. Also, thanks Shawn, for letting me use snippets of your hard-won code as well. Special thanks also go to Truett Woods who has opened my eyes in a lot of ways to good coding practices, and for the use of one of his base code queries in Chapter 1. Thanks to Joe Healy of devfish fame, a straight up bud whose .Net tacklebox is more full than mine. I will be getting the devfish tattoo next. Finally, I would personally like to thank Throwing Muses, The Pixies and Primus for providing the music that helped me through the many late nights. OK, so they will never read this and offer to come over to play a set at a backyard BBQ, I know, but one can hope. viii INTRODUCTION This book, as with almost all books, started out as an idea. I wanted to accumulate together those scripts and tools that I have built over the years so that DBAs could sort through them and perhaps adapt them for their own circumstances. I know that not every script herein will be useful, and that you might ask "Why are you using this table and not that DMV" or "Why is this code not compatible with SQL Server 2008?" After writing about SQL Server solutions now for the past 10 years, I can expect this criticism, and understand it fully. Everyone has their own ways of solving problems. My goal is to provide useful samples that you can modify as you please. I wrote the book the way it is because I did not want to bore DBAs to tears with another 500+ page textbook-style tome with step-by-step instructions. I wanted this book to be a novel, a book of poetry, a murder mystery, a ghost story, an epic trilogy, a divine comedy. But realizing that this is, after all, a technical book, I compromised by imbuing it with some humor and personality. If you make it as far as the monster at the end of this book, my hope is that you will have been entertained and can use the code from the Tacklebox in some fashion that will make your lives as DBAs easier. Why "The Tacklebox," you might ask, rather than "Zombie Queries," "You Can’t Handle the Code" or "You had me at BEGIN?" I think, as I push halfway through my career as a DBA and author, this book is as close as I will ever get to "The Old Man and the Sea"…oh yes, and apparently the "Toolbox" had been copyrighted. Plus, come on! Look at the cover of the book. How can I live here and not go fishing once in a while? Chapter 1 Here you will find wholesome SQL Server installations on the menu, complete with Express, Continental and Deluxe breakfast choices, depending on your application’s appetite. And there will be a little GUI setup support here. This chapter is about automation, and a lengthy script is included that will help you automate SQL installations and configurations. There is some foreshadowing lurking as well, such as code to enable a DDL trigger that I will show later in the book. This is the chapter where your new SQL Server installation is completely yours, having not as yet been turned over to the general populace of developers or users. Enjoy it while you can. Chapter 2 In this chapter, I introduce the DBA Repository, a documentation tool I have built using Integration Services and Reporting Services. It is easy to manage one, Introduction ix two or three SQL Server instances with the panoramic view the tool gives. It is even easy to work with ten SQL Servers without documentation, but when you have 70 or 100 or 2,000 SQL Servers without an automated documentation solution, you cannot successfully manage your SQL Server Landscape – ironically, that is the name of the chapter, "The SQL Server Landscape." Chapter 3 I think we can all agree that data at rest never stays that way. No, far from it. The data in this chapter has begun the swim up river to its spawning grounds and will migrate and transform like the intrepid salmon (hey, a fishing reference) from the open ocean, to river, to stream. Here, I look at different ways that data moves about, and I investigate tools such as SSIS and BCP that help facilitate such moves, whatever the reason, be it high availability, disaster recovery or offloaded reporting. Chapter 4 In this chapter, I describe one of the first hungry monsters of the book, the disk- space consuming databases. The hunger may not be abated entirely, but it can be controlled with proper planning and also with queries that will help you to respond to runaway growth. Here, I will show how to battle the appetite of space- killers with just a bit of planning, tempered with an understanding of how and why data and log files grow to consume entire disks. Chapter 5 There is a murder in this chapter. Someone or something is killed and most likely you, the DBA, will be the lone killer. Of course, I am talking about processes, SPIDs, that we see every day. Some are easier to kill than others. Some will just not die and I will explain why, using ridiculous code that I hope you never see in real life. The queries here were designed to help you get to the bottom of any issue as quickly as possible without the need for DNA testing. And I am not talking about Windows DNA, if you are old like me and remember this acronym for Distributed Networking Architecture, precursor to .NET. No, no .NET here. Chapter 6 To sleep perchance to dream…about failures. Here, I will introduce the sleep killer of DBAs everywhere, where jobs fail in the hours of darkness, and the on- call DBA is awakened from slumber several times a night in order to sway, zombie-like to the computer to restart failed backup jobs. You cannot resolve an issue unless you know about it and here, while discussing notifications and monitoring your SQL Server infrastructure, we will stay up late and tell horror stories. But, in the end, you will sleep better knowing all is well. . or three SQL Server instances with the panoramic view the tool gives. It is even easy to work with ten SQL Servers without documentation, but when you have 70 or 100 or 2,000 SQL Servers without. the local SQL users’ group in Pensacola and helps organize / speaks regularly at their events. Shawn is also a contributing writer to popular SQL websites such as Simple Talk and SQL Server Central table and not that DMV" or "Why is this code not compatible with SQL Server 2008?" After writing about SQL Server solutions now for the past 10 years, I can expect this criticism,