While working with Symantec NetBackup utility for SQL Server encountered several errors where backups are hanging in middle or failing with absurd error codes, below are some useful references and links which helps in troubleshooting such errors,   1. VDI related error:   Error message 1 2007-06-18 11:21:00.83 spid820 BackupVirtualDeviceFile::ClearError: failure on backup device ‘VDI_DeviceID‘. Operating system error 995(The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request.). Error […]

I Policy-Based Management is a very useful feature of SQL Server 2008 and later, if you like to audit certain parameters or enforce certain restriction on particular SQL Server/s, but first this to notice is will there be any overhead on current performance of SQL Server or not, basically the answer depends upon the way you are going to use it,   Q. What is the overhead of Policy-Based Management on my SQL Server? A. […]

While working with Symantec NetBackup utility for SQL Server came across Retry option, this helps in reducing manual effort spend in retrying failed backups, but in some scenarios there is certain overhead as well, below is brief info about this option,   How Retry Parameter works for SQL Server Backups   If you like to setup NetBackup to retry failed backups automatically then you can use following three parameters along with other, RETRYTYPE AUTO        #This parameter […]

I have written several batch files to automate activities in SQL Server environment and send HTML reports over email on completion; but whenever SQL Server is down or server is unavailable then the HTML output get disturbed as no error handling is being done. When tried to write error handling to fix the issue, faced trouble as was using following code as part of an error handling,   FOR /F “tokens=1,2 delims=,” %%G in (%CD%\SQLServerList_SQLReport.txt) […]

Today got a requirement to convert an Oracle trigger to SQL Server trigger, I have not worked on DDL triggers so did a check on code, it was pretty simple and alongside used few online conversion utilities (limited freeware conversion) which helped in achieving final results.   Image Courtesy: Manageengine.com   This post is not about writing all aspects of creating triggers; it is just about resources available to help in completing conversion.   First, […]

SQL Server Agent was unable to come up and no error was being reported (only error we found as “SQL agent services started and then stopped”, nothing was logged in Event viewer as well), hence was unable to identify the actual error with which agent was failing, following is done to fix it,   1. Ran following command to read agent error log using query analyzer,                                 EXEC sys.xp_readerrorlog 0,2                 Output was: Msg 22004, […]

After applying SQL Server service pack on one of SQL Server 2008, faced situation when user reporting then he is unable to open his webpage, he was receiving following error,   HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable     After restarting OS, IIS 7.5 services as well received same error, finally found the solution as,   1. Open the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager 2. Select the Application Pools node under the root node […]

I was searching for a solution to exclude specific database from Symantec NetBackup .bch script for SQL Server database backups, there are two ways to excluded databases,   1. By using EXCLUDE parameter As per admin guide, Name of a database to exclude when DATABASE $ALL is specified in a batch operation EXCLUDE can be used in a batch file only if DATABASE $ALL is used.   Following is sample .bch file with some example […]

If you are wondering that Cumulative Update download page has a package for SNAC, should you download and install or not? Then probably you will find your answer below.   Everything about SNAC is clearly explained at following link, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2009/10/23/should-i-have-a-snac-with-my-cumulative-update.aspx   Just to brief it out,   What is SNAC? SNAC stands for SQL Native Client   Why separate package is there on download page? It is a package only to apply updates to native […]

While trying to configure policy based management (PBM) across 100+ SQL servers in my domain faced issue that by default you need to import policies on individual servers or evaluate by connecting to a central policy server. Although this dilemma was broken by the articles written by several DBA’s across several forums and communities that Central management server (CMS) can be used to deploy or evaluate policies across set of servers or all SQL servers […]