Location, Location, Location
Today's newsletter is NOT brought to you by the real estate industry.
Location matters in SQL Server.
Where you put things is important, and can be critical to both performance and stability of a server.
A few years ago I inherited a SQL Server 2012 box. Kind of old at the time, but still supported by Microsoft.
None of the people at this company were involved in installing SQL Server. It was probably done by the hosting firm where it lived.
Overall, the databases worked fine and the application was speedy enough. Reporting kind of sucked but it was overnight.
The biggest issue they had, was that the person or process did a full default install. Next, Next, Next, Select everything, go.
I see you cringing.
Yes, all services installed. All system databases on the C drive. No tempdb configuration. New database data and log files on C. Backups on C.
Do you 'C' where this is going?
There were multiple other drives attached to a SAN, and the biggest databases were there, but a lot of smaller databases we on C.
And then it happened. Tempdb grew unexpectedly one day and filled the C drive, which was only 200GB to begin with.
Restarting on the fly to move it and add data files was not an option, so everybody got to be super nervous about system stability for a week. We did find some files to remove and give about 5% breathing room.
Lesson: SQL Server's out of the box defaults used to be horrible. As of today they are better, but still not great. Its not a plug and play application...its an enterprise level software platform that may be the entire company's lifeblood. make sure you've got things located in the right places, tuned for your workload and nothing installed that isn't required.
Dallas DBAs can help. Get in touch and we can start with a simple level 0 Health Check.
My Pluralsight course on installing SQL Server is here:
领英推荐
This is designed for laptop installs for developers, but I go over pretty much all of the best practices in it.
Thanks for reading!
Kevin
I Speed Up SQL Server Audits By 95% | MinionWare CEO | Author and Speaker | MS Certified Master | MidnightDBA Founder
1 年I'm taking off points for the "Do you 'C' where this is going?" pun. (I kid, I kid.....)
SQL Server Database Administrator
1 年Getting the right people involved in a situation like this is so important. Taking the time to understand what the environment is intended to accomplish cannot be understated and yet the time perspective (We need this five days ago!) can get in the way of a successful outcome.