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SQL Server Datafile maxsize reported incorrectly

Recently we encountered and filed a benign reporting BUG which reports the maxsize of the data file incorrectly. If you create a database & then alter the initial size of the database to be greater than maxsize & then query sys.database_files, sys.master_files, sysaltfiles the maxsize appears to be incorrectly reporting the older value of maxsize….

Disabling Non-Clustered Columnstore Index doesn’t appear to execute in Stored Procedure in SQL 2012

Consider the following scenario, you have a large fact table with non-clustered columnstore index. In SQL 2012, Columnstore index is not updatable hence at night when you load or purge the table, the first step would be to disable non-clustered columnstore index followed by insert/update/delete to the table and the final step would be to…

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Impact of Pre-grown Data & Log Files on the Restore Time of the Database

Today, I was asked the following question by one of my colleague who specializes in Sharepoint If the actual data is 50GB in size & if we create a pre-grown data file of 200GB to avoid autogrow & fragmentation, the database restore time for the pre-grown database should be much larger than the restore time…

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Troubleshooting SQL Server Hang using system_health Xevents

Recently my customer reported they were seeing intermittent server hangs, connection timeouts and slow performance on their SQL Server instance. The first question I had, do we have PSSDIAG running on the SQL Instance for me to be able to understand the cause of the hang. However since we won’t be running PSSDIAG proactively on…

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Can number of worker threads in SQL Server exceed max worker threads setting?

Recently while troubleshooting a performance issue on the SQL Instance which was experiencing a very high THREADPOOL wait type I observed something which I was unaware until I hit this issue. While I was looking at the system health xel files captured at the time of the issue, specifically at the query_processing event trace, the…

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Analyze SQL Database Table Space Usage using TreeMap Visualization in Excel 2013

One of fascinating features of Excel 2013 is “App for Office” option which exposes us to some of the great apps from Office store which you can download and install. One of such useful apps which I came across is TreeMap Data Visualization developed by Microsoft Research which allows you to represent hierarchical data of…

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Gotcha – Listening SQL Server Availability Group Listener on non-default port

While configuring SQL Server AlwaysON Availability Groups, as a part of security hardening practice it is recommended  to configure Availability Group to listen on a non-default port other than 1433. However the moment you configure your Availability Group Listener on a non-default port and if you SQL Server instance is also configured to listen on…