Tag Archives: server

How to configure critical server alerts?

Scenario

I ran a couple of health checks on my SQL Servers and the checks indicated I didn’t have critical alerts configured. What do I need to do?

Solution

SQL Server has alerts that get more important based on the severity of the alert. Anything of severity 16 or below tends to refer to the database and deals with issues that are tied to syntax errors, violations of foreign keys, etc. While those errors are typically important, they don’t refer to anything with regards to overall health of the SQL Server. Alerts 17 through 25 do. Those are the ones your health checks are probably firing on. So what are these alerts? Continue reading How to configure critical server alerts?

Setup SQL Server alerts and email

Scenario

Setting up an alert to e-mail an operator with a message is a multiple step process. You can setup database mail, define an operator and an alert, but still no e-mail is being sent. So how do you send an alert to an operator?

Solution

This solution involves restarting SQL Agent. Continue reading Setup SQL Server alerts and email

#Sql Server interview question: What is filestream in SQL Server?

Filestream allows you to store unstructured large objects (text documents, images, and videos) in the file system and have these files integrated within the database. Filestream basically integrates the SQL Server Database Engine with NTFS (New Technology File System); it basically stores the data in the varbinary(max) datatype. Continue reading #Sql Server interview question: What is filestream in SQL Server?

#Sql Server interview question: What do you mean by TABLESAMPLE in SQL Server?

TABLESAMPLE allows you to extract a sampling of rows from a table in the FROM clause. Continue reading #Sql Server interview question: What do you mean by TABLESAMPLE in SQL Server?

#Sql Server interview question: What is change tracking inside SQL Server 2008?

Change Tracking was a much anticipated feature in SQL Server 2008. Prior to SQL Server 2008, SQL DBAs had to code complex triggers and archive tables in order to track changes made to their database tables. Continue reading #Sql Server interview question: What is change tracking inside SQL Server 2008?