Comments on: SQLAuthority News – India Market and Third Party SQL Server Tools

By: Auditing Firms India

Auditing Firms India — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:26:03 +0000

Hi, I liked your article and I want to know more about your session as well as SQL server.

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:17:11 +0000

Spotlight is basically a look into all your perfmon counters and DMVs. I can certainly use Redgate’s MultiScript – or in SQL 2008 you can run scripts on multiple instances – but I’m still sold that you need to have one DBA that knows one tool well. I’m a Spotlight fan, no doubt.

By: pinaldave

pinaldave — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:11:23 +0000

This is excellent discussion Allen and Malathi.

I am sure readers will be benefited from this one.

Yes, I am very excited to be at SQL Pass Summit.

Kind Regards,

By: Malathi Mahadevan

Malathi Mahadevan — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:09:41 +0000

Allen, i think how many servers a DBA administers has a lot of factors involved….how many are mission critical is one of them (I work at a healthcare company so our applications are very mission critical and it is impossible for anyone to work on more than one server at a time). I like spotlight too, and I love Performance Analysis for query related issues. But i believe a good DBA has to know how to monitor the server without these things, and it is easy to get very dependant on them. In other words you have to know what DMVs to use, what counters on profiler/perfmon to check and so on if there is a problem, without that you are a tool dependant sort of mechanical person, not a true DBA.

Just my 2 cents. Hope you plan to make it to the summit. This is my 7th summit. I am looking forward to meeting Pinal this time and all my old friends as always :)

Malathi

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:28:56 +0000

Malathi,
Well you have to have a DBA to answer to the tool. With SQL 2008 there are in fact better monitoring tools built in, so I think this will be less of an issue for smaller companies moving forward. 6 DBAs? Wow…. I administered about 120 servers (all with just a default instance though – not my design) all myself – without any 3rd party tools. That was very, very painful to say the least. But I also do consulting work for some very small companies (govision2020.com, tgscom.com, pai.com) and I pretty much demand Spotlight. I can do without Performance Analysis, Capacity Mananger, LiteSpeed, etc. – but I can’t do without Spotlight no matter where I’m at ;-)

By: Malathi Mahadevan

Malathi Mahadevan — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:18:48 +0000

Allen, I know!! Where I work we have every tool that Quest has plus a few that Redgate has also. We have over 95 SQL Servers and between 6 DBAs having tools is not a choice. But smaller shops are not that way , I have also worked in a lot of places where they believe the DBA has to set up alerts or other mechanisms to monitor the server off hours, that is why they’d rather afford a DBA than pay for a tool. The majority smaller companies if you ask to pick between paying for a tool and a DBA’s salary would probably pick the latter since a human is more answerable than a tool!!

Malathi

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:52:33 +0000

Here is a post that may help with your database restore – it maps orphaned database users to logins. When you restore a database into a dev environment, for example, the users and logins are not mapped correctly – this will fix that:

http://allen-mcguire.blogspot.com/2009/10/sql-server-map-orphaned-users.html

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:05:26 +0000

Malathi,
If you simply look at the price tag, sure they may seem expensive. But for a tool like Spotlight, where you know everything going on in every instance and database you administer, the savings in time is huge. In other words, it pays for itself in no time at all when compared to having to monitor all that information manually. Sure, these are business tools – you aren’t going to purchase Spotlight for personal use.

By: Malathi Mahadevan

Malathi Mahadevan — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:54:34 +0000

Hi Pinal, would very much like to get more details on this from you. I worked a lot with vendors to gain some sponsorship for indian chapters in PASS and did not make any headway. Vendors are the primary sponsors of many user groups here in the States and to a large extent in UK also and the response was not encouraging. From what I learnt though – they said their business has to make a conscious decision to expand into Asia if they have to support UGs/customers there. That means understanding the paper work, as you said, and of course planning for revenues and so on. One vendor also made an interesting point – he said lot of businesses have branches in US/Europe while keeping call centers/development centers in India and they do take advantage of vendors in US/Europe.

Just fyi third party tools are regarded as expensive in US also, not everyone has them but only businesses that can afford.

Kind Regards

Malathi

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:56:11 +0000

No, you will want to script out the users and logins and transfer them that way. Users are stored in the master database, and it’s pretty rare that you would want to restore the master database. I do not recommend it. There are many freely available scripts to transfer users and logins, and even to map orphaned users. I will see if I can post my solutions on my blog for this process.

By: Ritesh Shah

Ritesh Shah — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:29:49 +0000

Allen,

Can’t it be transferred if we restore system databases to new server?

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:39:14 +0000

riteshshah, no matter what you do, you will have to transfer the logins. In fact, even if the logins exist on the new instance, they will still have to be re-mapped and such.

By: riteshshah

riteshshah — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:43:21 +0000

Hi Allen,

Your method is absolutely perfect to move database but what about login resides in old server? neither attach/detach nor backup/restore solve this issue. one need to move system databases also in order move their login, jobs etc.

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:25:59 +0000

@Nandha – my method has been to simply detach the SQL 2005 database, copy the data and log files to their new location, then attach them into your SQL 2008 instance. That not only is the easiest method, but you can always re-attach your SQL 2005 database(s) back into it’s original SQL 2005 instance as a back-out plan.

I’ve used this method to move SQL 2000 databases to SQL 2008 without issue as well. Works like a charm.

By: Anil Mahadev

Anil Mahadev — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:51:18 +0000

@Nandha,

Follow the steps outlined in this MSDN Primer on Upgrading the SQL Server Database engine from one version to another.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144267.aspx

Thanks

By: Nandha

Nandha — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:52:31 +0000

HI,

I want to convert my Database version sql server 2005 to Sql Server 2008.

1. Can ur people tell me how can i do this?

2. What unknown issues?

3. Compatibility issues?

4. Please advise me that convert steps.

Thanks,
Nandhu

By: riteshshah

riteshshah — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:32:34 +0000

Hi Pinal,

Personally I am really very much interested to know more about your session as well as about meeting too. :)

Thanks for sharing.

Ritesh Shah

By: Allen McGuire

Allen McGuire — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:45:37 +0000

“What was very interesting is that only 8 out of 72 people voted that they use a third party tool for SQL Server.”

That is amazing. I for one have been an avid fan of Quest tools for years. I can hardly imagine not having that 3rd monitor dedicated to Spotlight alone. I know everything going on for every instance I administer in one simple console. If I want to dig in deeper, I can do so. I can receive real-time alerts based on criteria I configure. Great tool – best of breed in my opinion.

Another product I love from Spotlight is Performance Analysis. Other products like LiteSpeed are useful, but not as necessary now that SQL 2008 can compress backups. SQL Watch is also a thing of that past with the new auditing and monitoring features built into SQL 2008.

At any rate, interesting post. I just fired up a blog of my own regarding SQL Server. I have simply not found enough good information out there for SQL 2008, which I’ve been administering for about a year now.

Allen