• DMV#1: Are you Connected?
• DMV#2: Session Ownership
• DMV#3: Current expensive, or blocked, requests
• DMV#4: Query Stats – Find the "top X" most expensive cached queries
• DMV#5: How many single-use ad-hoc Plans?
• DMV#6: Ad-hoc queries and the plan cache
• DMV#7: Investigate expensive cached stored procedures
• DMV#8: Find Queries that are waiting, or have waited, for a Memory Grant
• DMV#9: Monitor long-running transactions
• DMV#10: Identify locking and blocking issues
• DMV#11: Find Missing Indexes
• DMV#12: Interrogate Index Usage
• DMV#13: Table Storage Stats (Pages and Row Counts)
• DMV#14: Monitor TempDB
• DMV#15: Investigate Disk Bottlenecks via I/O Stalls
• DMV#16: Investigate Disk Bottlenecks via Pending I/O
• DMV#17: Why are we Waiting?
• DMV#18: Expose Performance Counters
• DMV#19: Basic CPU Configuration
• DMV#20: CPU Utilization History
• DMV#21: Monitor Schedule activity
• DMV#22: System-wide Memory Usage
• DMV#23: Detect Memory Pressure
• DMV#24: Investigate Memory Usage Across all Caches
• DMV#25: Investigate memory use in the Buffer Pool
• DMV#26: Rooting out Unruly CLR Tasks
• DMV#27: Full Text Search
• DMV#28: Page Repair attempts in Database Mirroring

The book’s authors include Glenn Berry (Blog | Twitter), Louis Davidson (Blog | Twitter), and Tim Ford (Blog | Twitter), and you can download the eBook and scripts here.

Simple-Talk Publishing has released a new, free 291 page eBook called Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server, by Alex Kuznetsov. Here is what the book covers, as described from the book’s introduction.

“Resilient T-SQL code is code that is designed to last, and to be safely reused by others. The goal of defensive database programming, and of this book, is to help you to produce resilient T-SQL code that robustly and gracefully handles cases of unintended use, and is resilient to common changes to the database environment.

“Too often, as developers, we stop work as soon as our code passes a few basic tests to confirm that it produces the “right result” in a given use case. We do not stop to consider the other possible ways in which the code might be used in the future, or how our code will respond to common changes to the database environment, such as a change in the database language setting, or a change to the nullability of a table column, and so on.

“In the short-term, this approach is attractive; we get things done faster. However, if our code is designed to be used for more than just a few months, then it is very likely that such changes can and will occur, and the inevitable result is broken code or, even worse, code that silently starts to behave differently, or produce different results. When this happens, the integrity of our data is threatened, as is the validity of the reports on which critical business decisions are often based. At this point, months or years later, and long after the original developer has left, begins the painstaking process of troubleshooting and fixing the problem.

“Would it not be easier to prevent all this troubleshooting from happening? Would it not be better to spend a little more time and effort during original development, to save considerably more time on troubleshooting, bug fixing, retesting, and redeploying? After all, many of the problems that cause our code to break are very common; they repeat over and over again in different teams and on different projects.

“This is what defensive programming is all about: we learn what can go wrong with our code, and we proactively apply this knowledge during development. This book is filled with practical, realistic examples of the sorts of problems that beset database programs.”

You can download Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server here.

As DBAs, we are often put in the position of purchasing software from third-party vendors. If you are like me, you are probably amazed at the wide variation in software prices, and how the price of a product seems to bear little relationship with its actual cost. For example, why is the SQL Server Enterprise Edition so much more expensive than the SQL Server Standard Edition?

So how do software companies price their software? If you are interested in what lurks in the minds of many software companies, and want to learn how they justify the prices they charge, download a free copy of the eBook Don’t Just Roll the Dice: A Usefully Short Guide to Software Pricing, by Neil Davidson. Neal is the co-founder and joint CEO of Red Gate Software, and the founder of the annual Business of Software Conference.

This short book (70 pages) takes about an hour to read, and reviews all of the different pricing models that software vendors use, and why. You will learn about many aspects of software pricing, including pricing psychology, pitfalls, and strategies. The information you learn will be helpful in understanding not only how software is priced, but will give you some hints as to how you might be able to negotiate with software vendors to get a better price. In effect, this book will help make you a better informed software buyer.

Given that this book is a short read, I recommend it to everyone who purchases software, or for that matter, for anyone who is thinking of selling their own software. (I know there are a few budding DBA entrepreneurs out there).

Full Disclosure: The author of this book is one of the co-founders of Red Gate Software, and my boss. And no, he didn’t ask me to write this blog post. I read the book myself, and am recommending it independently as a useful book for DBAs and developers to read in order to help round out their education. For independent reviews of the book, check out the reviews at Amazon.com. You can also purchase a paperback copy of the book at Amazon.com if you prefer paper over an eBook.

For example, in SQL Server 2005/2008, I could run the following T-SQL code to find all of the tables in the AdventureWorks database that includes the string “Vendor”.

USE AdventureWorks
GO
SELECT  TABLE_CATALOG, TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME, TABLE_TYPE
FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE   TABLE_NAME LIKE ‘%Vendor%’

Or, if I wanted to find all the columns in the AdventureWorks database that include the string “Vendor”, I could run this T-SQL code.

USE AdventureWorks
GO
SELECT  TABLE_CATALOG, TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME
FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE   COLUMN_NAME LIKE ‘%Vendor%’

Using INFORMATION_SCHEMA views to find specific object names (and related data) is very powerful and let’s you write many different queries to find a lot of information about your database’s objects. The only downside to doing this is that you have to write the T-SQL code to look for what you are searching for, and for databases with thousands of objects, the queries might run a little slow.

If you have SQL Server 2008, you have the option of using Management Studio’s (SSMS) built-in search feature. If you are not familiar with this feature, go to “View” from the main menu and select “Object Explorer Details”. If you look near the top of the screen, you will see a search box, as you can see below.

In the above screen shot, I have searched for “%Vendor%” from within the AdventureWorks database, and 17 matches were found. If I click on any of the objects, then a few details about the object are displayed at the bottom of the screen.

This is certainly an easier way to search for objects than writing your own T-SQL code, but the information it returns about each object, as you can see, is limited. Or, let’s say that I wanted to jump to one of the objects that was found in order to view it in more detail from within SSMS. Unfortunately, I can’t do this automatically. I must manually find the object using the SSMS Object Explorer, then open it up from there to view any details. The SSMS search feature also doesn’t have the ability to search for text strings within objects, which is often something that DBAs want to do. And if your database has thousands of objects, it might take a while for SSMS search to return all of the results.

Now we get to the main purpose of this article, and that is to talk about SQL Search, a new free searching tool from Red Gate Software. SQL Search has the ability to search for object names, or text strings within objects, directly from SSMS. The best way to learn what it can do is to show you, so let’s get started.

To install SQL Search, download the free tool from here, and then run the installer on any computer that has SQL Server 2005/2008 SSMS (SSMS Express is also supported) installed on it. Installation takes less than a minute, and is fast and easy.

Need to Know: The first time you use SQL Search, it will take several seconds, or a little longer if your server has lots of databases with lots of objects, to index them. Once it has done this, it can find any object or text string virtually instantly.

The next time you start SSMS, you will notice that a “SQL Search” button has been added to SSMS’s menu.

Whenever you need to quickly find any object, or text string, within a SQL Server instance, simply click on the button, and the SQL Search screen appears.

Using SQL Search is very easy. All you have to do is to enter whatever it is you are searching for into the search textbox and press “Enter.” Of course, before you do that, you may want to set some additional options first. For example, by default, any search string you enter will be assumed to be, in effect, a wild card search. If you don’t want to perform a wild card search, but an exact match search instead, then click on the “Exact Match” checkbox.

To the right of the “Exact Match” option, you will notice that you can choose three more options that act as filters. The first option is used to specify the type of object, if any, that you want to search for.

As you can see above, you can choose to search all objects, or some subset of objects. If you know what type of object you are searching for, then using this option will help to filter out any data that is not useful to you.

After selecting the type of object you are looking for, you can also select which database you want to search by selecting it from the drop-down box.

As you can see above, not only can you search individual databases, you can also search all databases at once, if you want.

The last option is to select which SQL Server instance you want to search. You can search any SQL Server instance that is registered with SSMS.

Tip: I don’t know about you, but I often forget the entire name of an object, but I can remember part of it. Since SQL Search allows me to quickly search for any string, I can just enter the part of the object name I can remember, and then any object that matches is displayed. I can then quickly search through the results, and then quickly identify the name of the exact object I am looking for.

Now that we know about the available search options, let’s try a search. Like I did in my previous examples, let’s search for the string “Vendor” in the AdventureWorks database, and while we are at it, let’s go ahead and search all objects to see what SQL Search finds for us. When I perform this search, SQL Search find 43 instances where the string “Vendor” is found in an object name, or as text inside an object.

As you can see, a lot of search data is returned, including the database where the object is located, the object’s schema, the object’s name, the object’s type, and where the matches occurs on. While the first four columns of the results are obvious, the fifth column, “Matches on”, may not be so obvious.

If the result in the “Matches on” column is “Name”, then the match is on the object’s name. If the result is “Column”, the match is on a column inside an object. If the result is “text”, then the match was found on text inside an object. To see what I mean, notice in the above screen shot that I have highlighted the “vVendor” object in the top portion of the screen, which is a view, and notice that “Text” is in the “Matches on” column. If you look at the bottom of the screen, you will see the T-SQL code that was used to create the view, and highlighted in yellow is the word you are searching on.

Tip: If too much data is returned, you can always filter the data by changing the filter options at the top of the screen.

Now let’s say that we want to explore this object in more detail from SSMS. Instead of having to find the object manually, all I have to do is to double-click any object displayed in the results and I am brought directly to the object from within the SSMS Object Explorer, as you can see below.

Now that I am at the object, I can easily use any of the features available to me from within SSMS to explore or work with the object.

Once you are done using SQL Search, just close the window and it is gone and out of your way.

And that’s it. That’s all you need to know how to use SQL Search. As you can see, not only is it a powerful tool, it is incredibly easy to use. Given that the tool is free, I highly recommend all DBAs to download it and give it a try.

For example, if you want to find all of the objects on a SQL Server instance that have the string “orders” in it, this is easily done, as you can see below.

Besides displaying all of the relevant objects, it also provides the T-SQL code that was used to create the object.

When the final version comes out (which will also be free), I’ll provide a longer description of how you to use the tool. But in the meantime, the beta version works very well and can be put to immediate use. Download SQL Search here.

2010 is beginning to look like a great year for SQLSaturday events this year. Already, there are nine planned, and many more in the works. These free, one-day events are a great way to hone your DBA knowledge, and to develop new contacts. If you are interested in speaking at an event, its also a great way to get speaking experience.

I will be attending as many of these events as I can in 2010. So far, of the nine currently scheduled, I will be attending four of them.

Currently, you can go to the SQLSaturday.com website and register to attend these events.

If you don’t see a SQLSaturday in your area, keep checking back to see what new events have been added. Or, consider putting on a SQLSaturday yourself. Find out how here.

Devenius Software is also the company behind the website Snipstorm.com. This is a brand new community website where SQL Server DBAs can share snippets of their T-SQL code with other members of the community.