Update from Kendra (Nov 2018): I’m keeping this post for posterity, but I REALLY don’t recommend the script. You’d be much better off using a production monitoring tool that did this job, or @AdamMachanic ‘s sp_WhoIsActive.
Maybe you’re a user in a reporting database running a long query in the read committed isolation level, merrily blocking a process which needs to load data.
As an add on to my last post, here is what I currently do use to track index usage. This shows usage, columns in the index, and index size on disk. The size can be quite useful to know when evaluating how much an index is worth– typically if this index is large then you’re paying a fair amount on the inserts.
Update: improved/more recent version of queries for this are here.
It can be pretty difficult to manage statistics in data warehouses, or even OLTP databases that have very large tables.
One reason I started this blog was just the idea of going through my catalog of scripts and reviewing them and sharing out what might be useful to people.
Here is a quick one I put together a while back. I was starting to work with a group of servers [at an unnamed company, always an unnamed company!]. Some of the instances had been configured long ago, and I found some linked servers where passwords had been hardcoded into the login mappings.
I am going to post my monstrously big index query.
Why? Because it’s AWESOME. No really, it actually is awesome. At least, if you like that sort of thing. I use some variant of this almost daily, and I tweak it fairly regularly to suit the needs of whatever I’m working on. So it’s a work in progress, but I find it constantly valuable.
Each time I work with a new system, it can take a while to familiarize myself with what all the SQL Server Agent jobs do. Often there are quite a few jobs, and sometimes they have legacy names that either don’t describe what the job does very well anymore, or is just hard to understand.
I use the SQL Agent a lot, and it is handy for a lot of things, but it can be frustrating to not be able to pass state information between steps.
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