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Database

Everything our consultants learn while running databases for customers: Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Delphix. Expect hands-on posts about installation, day-to-day administration, backup and recovery, performance tuning, replication and upgrades.

An example of ORA-01152: file … was not restored from a sufficiently old backup

By Franck Pachot . Oracle Error: ORA-01547: warning: RECOVER succeeded but OPEN RESETLOGS would get error below ORA-01152: file … was not restored from a sufficiently old backup ORA-01110: data file … This error is one of the most misunderstood recovery error. It can happen in different case but I have here a simple example to reproduce it, with some… 

SQL Server CPU limitation for Express and Standard Edition

Introduction When performing an audit on an SQL Server VM the first thing the system administrator told me was that there’s no issue with the CPU on this box, the monitoring shows it’s always around 50% usage. Problem Here is the Task Manager: The average CPU usage on this VM is indeed 50% but half of the cores are stuck… 

SQL Server: Get email notifications for Error Log entries

Introduction In a previous blog post, I did a T-SQL script reading Audit files to send emails with valuable information about instance changes. In this one, you will see how to get nice emails from critical errors or specific events occurring on the instance using the ErrorLog. A common best practice for any DBA is to configure SQL Server Agent… 

Pass a variable to a trigger in PostgreSQL

By Franck Pachot . With Oracle there are many ways to set a state in the session: context variables, set with DBMS_SESSION.SET_CONTEXT and retrieved with SYS_CONTEXT, or package global variables, or global or private temporary tables with ON COMMIT PRESERVE ROWS,… How would you do it in PostgreSQL? I’m taking an example from a Yugabyte slack question, as Yugabyte SQL… 

SQL Server: How to delete the msdb backup history kindly

This week I noticed some slowness on queries related to backup history. The instance had a huge msdb database (more than 10GB size), the backup history had never been purged. I already wrote a post on this topic and provided a small PowerShell script using dbatools to clean the backup history. The issue with sp_delete_backuphistory or Remove-DbaDbBackupRestoreHistory is that the… 

SQL Server: Replace the old SCOM login by the new one

It’s every time hard to replace a login who as role and permissions in every database like the service account for SCOM. In the previous version of Scom, you create a service account (dbiscom) to access the SQL Server and check the health of the databases. Now it’s possible to use the System Center Operations Manager Health Service (NT SERVICEHealthService).… 

K8s on Windows/VirtualBox

By Franck Pachot . This is a little demo, easy to copy-paste, if you want to play with Kubernetes on your laptop. And, not a simple “Hello World” but a real database running here, able to scale up and down with full availability. Install Virtualbox I use Oracle VirtuaBox because I’m a big fan of Oracle products, especially when they… 

SQL Server: Audit changes on Instance Configuration, Linked Servers and Agent Jobs

Introduction Very often with our customers, there is only one person with the DBA role. The configuration of the instances is then under control and if anything strange has to be questioned, the culprit is quickly identified. 🙂 When many people, not necessarily having DBA knowledge, have high permissions (sysadmin) on instances it becomes important to know who does what.… 

SQL Server connectivity issue – troubleshoot TLS configuration

In the blog post, I will share a case of troubleshooting a connectivity issue with SQL Server. The problem occurred in a migration context. The SQL Server databases (in version 2008 to 2014) from multiple applications were consolidated on a new server with SQL Server 2019. Application servers were also migrated to new VMs. The new servers are hosted on… 

temBoard on SLES15 – 2 – The agent

In the last post we’ve installed the temBoard repository and the UI. As this alone is not so much fun, we’ll be installing the temBoard agent on another SLES 15 machine in this post. We’ll end up with one PostgreSQL instance registered in the temBoard repository and this instance is constantly monitored. With the repository and the UI we had… 

Rename your DB clone completely

Introduction Have you ever renamed your database? When you cloned a DB, you probably started it with a new name and cloning (duplicating) with RMAN provided a new DBID, right? So why should we need to rename a DB? There may be several reasons: due to changed company rules, you need to rename all your DBs After a restore you… 

SQL Server – Contained Database

Introduction You may have encounter already case when an application offers the possibility to create and maintain SQL database users and consequently the associated SQL Server instance logins. That’s of course not especially really what a DBA likes, loosing control on the logins that are created on the instance he is responsible of. But sometimes you have to deal with…