Featured Article(s)
Working with SharePoint 2010 Content Rating feature
SharePoint 2010 allows for users to rate site content which you can later aggregate and display ratings in search and various other views and modules. It`s a great new feature and in this article I would like to show you some tips and tricks on how enabling ratings pragmatically in your deployment script for your lists and libraries.
SelectViews Show Available
Kalen Delaney is on the show – talking about indexing, performance and some of her work in training and writing… and an announcement. Also on the show, are data use expectations growing…?
[Watch the Show Here]
Does Your SQL Server Talk To You?
Have you wondered why it can be so tough to understand what’s really going on with SQL Server? When things are not quite going as they should, have you noticed that it can be very challenging to find out what’s happening, where to look for answers and where to find out the root cause of a given issue? It can be very challenging indeed. This is where SQL Diagnostic Manager comes in – you can set up alerts that let you know what’s happening, from deadlocks to cluster failures and every day issues of performance, SQL Diagnostic Manager can be a great tool to save you hours and hours of time investigating. Get your free trial and check it out.
What is Your Top 3?
What are the top 3 items you keep track of, monitor, do or wish you could do with your SQL Servers?
It’s a hard question – I was talking with someone today that asked me that question and I really had to think. If you’re getting started with really managing your SQL Servers on a full or part-time basis, you need something to hang your hat on – a top 3 or so to get started. What’s your top 3? Not 4, not 2, 3. What would you suggest to someone getting started so they could get moving forward, make a difference and have an impact on their servers?
This is different from "Day 1 as a DBA" – where you’re getting to know your servers and such. This is more if you have the luxury of choosing what you want to pay attention to first.
Here are my top 3:
1. Check maintenance plans, make sure you have backups being pulled, and that you’re moving them off the server after they’ve completed. Make sure your backups are working… test a restore.
2. Take vital stats on your system – memory, CPU, disk space – get a handle on starting to project growth in usage, set the foundation for knowing what to expect with your system.
3. Understand what normal is in your SQL Server and system logs – look for errors, understand what’s OK, what’s not.
It borders on what to do your first day, but really if you’re trying to have a key set of things you need to be doing on an ongoing basis, this is kind of where I ended up. Also assuming I could only pick 3 to start with. That made it pretty tough.
What would you pick as your top 3? Drop me an email, let’s see if we have a general rule of thumb that we can create in the community.
Featured Script
stripChars – function to strip all but numerics from a string
T-SQL function for stripping selected chars / type of chars from a string… (read more)