SQL Phone Home: Teaching Your SQL Servers to Call for Help

1. SQL Phone Home
Teaching SQL Server to Call for Help

3. 3
mikehillwig.com
twitter.com/mikehillwig
linkedin.com/in/mikehillwig
mike@mikehillwig.com

4. Mike Hillwig
 SQL Server DBA
 Working with SQL Server since SQL 7
 Senior DBA at hosting division of a financial software
company owned by a large financial institution
 Resume includes Acme Packet Oracle, Shawmut Design
and Construction, Equitable Resources
 Certified in ITIL Foundations

5. Beware of the Blogs
 There is some amazing advice out
there. But…
 Anybody can put bad advice on the
internet
 Trust people you know
 Assume I’m an idiot
 I don’t trust people who say
“ALWAYS” or “NEVER”
 Test everything in your own test
environment first.

6. Housekeeping
 Don’t let me talk too fast.
 Blog post at mikehillwig.com/go/phonehome
 Please complete your session evaluations.

7. What is this SQL Agent thing?
 SQL Server’s tool for automating processes
 Allows you to schedule things to run
 SQL Scripts
 Windows executables
 WMI scripts
 Can even watch for certain errors or situations and take
action

8. What are we doing with it?
 Simple cause and effect
 If you see something, say something
 Run a query that looks for problems
 If problem is found, call for help

9. Spam vs Mail
 Today’s examples send mail
 In a perfect world, you’d log a ticket with your support system
 But for the sake of simplicity in our scripts, we’re sending mail
today
 Make sure your SQL Agent can send mail
 Enable Mail XPs
 Also going to write to the Windows Application Event Log

10. My rule
 All alerts must be actionable.
 Everything else is noise.

11. What are some examples?
1. Server restarted
2. Autoshrink enabled.
3. Databases never backed up or no full backup in X hours
4. No transaction log backup in X hours
5. Default File Growths
6. Databases with datafiles that don’t grow
7. Failed jobs in the past 24 hours

12. See Something. Say Something.

14. Enough Talk
 Lets demo!

15. But wait. There’s more!

16. SQL Agent Alerting
 Several options
 Error message
 Severity condition
 Performance Conditions