gharrison · Senior Database Administrator · ✭✭✭✭✭

Agreed. When looking at this one, don't use logic, just follow the exact wording.

A great article! If only application developers understood this. Unfortunately, it's been my experience that very few vendors employ experienced DBAs on their development teams, instead they leave this to the "accidental DBA", who without the knowledge and experience that comes from being a dedicated true DBA, has little…

I'm a DBA so this question doesn't really apply, but you didn't give an option for that.

FYI ... As a Canadian, I still reside in North America ... and we spell it "centre" as well. That said, we're used to assuming people mean the US spelling. Similar to "colour" vs "color", etc.

Getting the funding from the business to properly monitor the entire environment, rather than just specific pieces.

I had a similar issue and with some help from support, and some scripting, I've been able to implement a heartbeat alert. There is a table in DPA that gets updated with a new value internally (their own heartbeat). I then extract that value every half hour and store it in a custom table. I then have a custom alerting…

Today's Oct 8 question seems flawed. Perhaps the answered were meant to be check boxes instead of radio buttons?

Don't get me wrong, I love SolarWinds. The breadth and depth of their product offerings are superb. It's the costs that are difficult to get approved. As a result, we have to pick and choose very carefully what we monitor, and with what tools, and as a result we have gaps. The tools are great, being able to afford them for…

Really need to get into the habit of checking comment before I answer a question. Doh!

Hey rshroeder, I've been using DPA since it was Ignite by Confio (bought by SolarWinds a few years back). I'm a DBA, and I use it independently of other SolarWinds products, so I'm not sure where you heard you needed SAM or SRM, but that's not the case. It's probably the best database monitoring tools I've used in my…

Hi Wendy! First, thank you for all you do for all of us Thwacksters! These missions are often a bright spot in a dreary day. Also, gotta say as a Star Wars fan, this months prizes are awesome. If I could make a suggestion though, would it be possible to see some stats for the questions that we've answered? Things like…

Have to agree with you. I selected the "correct" answer, but totally disagree with it. Blindly deleting a VM that has lots of snapshots doesn't make sense to me. In fact, I would think a VM with lots of snapshots is probably being more actively used that one that's never had a snapshot. Now, looking at how many snapshots…

Thanks for this, it was a fun distraction. Doh! Missed one. Still fun though.

Looking for a new big screen TV to hang on the wall.

I know this is old now, but I was looking at something else and thought I'd update this with what I ended up doing. In the end I leveraged data collected by a customer DPA alert that was suggested above. I then adjusted the length of time that data was kept in order to keep one year of data within the DPA database.…

Hi Naren, I am not aware of a built-in report or alert for this in DPA, although that would be nice. I use my own custom scripts and monitoring, in conjunction with how I manage my DBs to try and stay on top of this. Basically, here's what I do. I adjust each DB's size and growth settings for every DB in my environment. I…

Fun mission! I especially liked how you had some fun with the questions like the Monty Python one.

I’ve taken a look at the alerts you mentioned. Database Freespace – Only available for SQL Server, but I run both SQL and Oracle. If this was available for both, this would definitely help, although I’m also interested in growth over time, to just how is the space within the database getting used over a period of time, to…

Great list of steps for a DBA coming into a new job. Having gone through this sort of thing myself more than once, I'd modify the "Check Backups" step slightly, and move some of what your doing in the "Establish Environmental Baselines" forward a bit. I completely agree, the number one priority is to make sure backups are…

Agreed. I opted to take a best guess rather than start getting annoying phone calls. Guessed wrong ... oh well, still better than the phone calls.

Log files ... event logs, application logs, database logs, etc.

Hi all, as I am a DBA, perhaps I can offer another perspective. You are absolutely correct that simply having a replica exist would not in itself be able to improve query performance. I believe the point that was being targeted here though was that if you have a a replica, and you configure things correctly, you can…

Sorry, but not so impressed with this month's mission.

DPA, NCM, SAM, NPM

I understand the thought process behind looking are available resources first, but here's an example where that could lead you astray. If a Network Analyst were to look at one of my database servers (I'm a DBA), they might focus on the fact it is consuming almost all available memory. The mistake here, is that's normal for…

Same. Even the message that came up after said having multiple databases didn't reduce the need for compliance. Definitely seems like a bug here.

Thanks for all your efforts on our behalf Danielle!

Just a follow up. In the example you were sharing, you had one of your nodes go down in a cluster. That is definitely something you can monitor through DPA, and absolutely should. If an cluster goes down to a single node, then you will have the potential for massive TLog growth, as it's not going to be able to clear those…

Thanks!

Sorry, don't use SAM, that's someone else.