Being honest to yourself is one of the biggest success mantra.

Being honest to yourself is one of the biggest success mantra.

This is all about my personal experience and I found being honest to myself is one of the biggest success mantra. Many times we plan to change our habits or we plan to achieve something and every time we comprise on them and we don’t achieve them by consoling ourselves that it is ok. This where we are not honest with us.

If we have to achieve success just follow 3 simple steps, after sometime you will wonder how things can be achieved.

1. Plan your carrier (clarity).
If you already have a carrier plan that is really great. If not, This won’t come by so easily, keep searching start looking around and start asking yourself what you want, you will find a moment where you will know what you want to be. Once you are ready don’t change this and be honest to yourself.
2. Plan your next 3, 6 months or an year based on what you want to achieve. I would say start with 3 months or even 1 month is also fine.

3. Chunk your goals to small parts so that some progress can be found every day. 
This is where actual test begins if you want succeed, you have to write down what you want to achieve every day either same day morning or previous day evening. At the end of the day make sure to revisit and check what you have completed and what you have not. Make sure to tick them right or wrong. I suggest use Red pen for wrong and blue for right.
You might fail to meet all your small goals everyday but eventually you will see that you will be able to finish everything on your daily activity list. This is possible only if you are honest to yourself and tick your goals right or wrong every day and include them in your next day activities. Don’t move to another activity as long as you don’t finish the one which you have not completed previous day.

That's it you might feel this is very simple, but practice them to see how difficult they are at the beginning and how great things can be achieved once you have built this habbit or created a pattern in your brain.

Don’t give up be honest is the mantra. 

Hope this is useful to someone. All the very best to everyone.

How to enable Trace flag without restarting SQL Server immediately

How to enable Trace flag without restarting SQL Server immediately

Many times when DBA has to enable a Trace flag permanently we have to go to Customer and ask for a downtime or wait for monthly or quarterly agreed downtime. However we can avoid this wait time in two simple steps:

1. Enable Trace flag at global level with DBCC command as below.
DBCC TRACEON( 3226, -1) , this trace flag helps not to log successful backup completions.
2. Add trace flag as startup parameter with help of -T and dont restart SQL Services.

When we restart Windows box or SQL Services during OS or SQL patching, trace flag enabled using -1 will get disabled at shutdown of SQL Services and Trace flag added part of startup parameter will take effect from SQL Server startup.

This is one of the short article, hope this finds helpful to someone. Stay tunned for more knowledge sharing.

Effective management of SQL Server logs and different ways to read them

Effective management of SQL Server logs and different ways to read them

Why do we need to manage SQL Server error logs efficiently?
Most important reason is readability, I have faced this situation many times while working with many SQL Server Instances. When we are trouble shooting SQL Server it is very hard go through many lines of logs which are useless, sometimes as DBA we would be working under time pressure.
Few things in SQL Server error log are useless bye default like successful logins (if you have enabled), Successful backups and deadlocks from SQL Server 2008 R2 onwards. Based on my experience it is always good to keep SQL Server logs short and quickly readable from notepad when SQL is down or not accessible. Here are few of the changes we need to implement:

    1. Enable Trace flag 3226, this helps not to log all successful backup completions.
This can enabled by adding -T3226 as start up parameter permanently. This requires down time for  SQL Server however we can avoid this, I will explain the steps in my another article.

    2. Dont enable Deadlock trace flags from SQL Server 2008 R2 onwards, as complete deadlock details are available as part of default System health Extended event. I will explain on How get deadlock details from this extended event in a separate article, I will post the link once it is ready.
  
    3. Last but not least recycle your error logs to keep them small and number of logs or length of the logs can be decided based on Customer requirements.

So far we have reviewed few of the setting those can help keep our SQL Server error log short and sweet, now we will see how to read SQL Server Error log.

SQL Server error log can be read with the help of XP_READERRORLOG or SP_READERRORLOG. My favorite is XP_READERRORLOG as it has more parameters. Details are below:


EXEC master.dbo.xp_readerrorlog 0, 1, null, null, null, null, N'desc'
1st parameter is for error log file number you want to read: 0 = current, 1 = Archive #1, 2 = Archive #2, etc...
2nd Parameter is for which log you want to read: 1 or NULL = error log, 2 = SQL Agent log
3rd Parameter is for 1st string you want to search on.
4th Parameter is for further fine tune your search, which means 4th parameter can be used to filter the output of 3rd or 1st string parameter.
5th Start date time in SQL Server error log.
6th End date time in SQL Server error log.
7th how do you want to sort your output based on date time of error log: N'asc' = ascending, N'desc' = descending.

SP_READERRORLOG error log internally uses XP_READERRORLOG however SP_READERRORLOG has limited number of parameters and they are:

1st parameter is for error log file number you want to read: 0 = current, 1 = Archive #1, 2 = Archive #2, etc...
2nd Parameter is for which log you want to read: 1 or NULL = error log, 2 = SQL Agent log
3rd Parameter is for 1st string you want to search on.
4th Parameter is for further fine tune your search, which means 4th parameter can be used to filter the output of 3rd or 1st string parameter.

Hope this article finds useful. Thanks for reading.

Database mirroring connection error 4 'An error occurred while receiving data: '10054(An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.)

Database mirroring connection error 4 'An error occurred while receiving data: '10054(An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.)

Recently while working on DR test, I have come across unknown issue. I could not find much help from google on this. This is regarding database mirroring and this should stand same for AlwaysON up to some extent as they both use Endpoints to communicate and service accounts for encrypting data over endpoints.

Problem description:

Part of the DR exercise we have disabled Mirroring on MSSQ 2014 databases and brought DR DB’s online. Post DR exercise when we try to re-establish mirroring we have started getting below error:

Primary logs:

2018-03-20 22:50:40.120 spid40s      Database mirroring connection error 4 'An error occurred while receiving data: '10054(An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.)'.' for 'TCP://XX.XX.XX.XX:7077'.

2018-03-20 22:50:55.780 spid22s      Error: 1443, Severity: 16, State: 2.

As part of general trouble shooting I have stopped and started Endpoints on both servers no luck. Tried telnet from both servers everything was fine and no issues found.

Then tried researching error logs as they say for any issues a good troubleshooting will always start from SQL Server error logs. But in this case, we must check SQL Server error logs from both Primary and DR servers, as the issue is related to mirroring and we could not find any useful information from Primary.

When checked Mirror or DR server error logs surprisingly handshake errors were logged. This helped to find root cause the fix the issue.

Mirror logs:

2018-03-20 22:54:15.160 Logon        Database Mirroring login attempt failed with error: 'Connection handshake failed. An OS call failed: (80090311) 0x80090311(No authority could be contacted for authentication.). State 67.'.  [CLIENT: xx.xx.xx.x]

2018-03-20 22:54:20.200 Logon        Database Mirroring login attempt failed with error: 'Connection handshake failed. An OS call failed: (80090311) 0x80090311(No authority could be contacted for authentication.). State 67.'.  [CLIENT: xx.xx.xx.x]

2018-03-20 23:06:55.010 Logon        Error: 17806, Severity: 20, State: 14.

2018-03-20 23:06:55.010 Logon        SSPI handshake failed with error code 0x8009030c, state 14 while establishing a connection with integrated security; the connection has been closed. Reason: AcceptSecurityContext failed. The Windows error code indicates the cause of failure. The logon atte

2018-03-20 23:06:55.010 Logon        Error: 18452, Severity: 14, State: 1.

2018-03-20 23:06:55.010 Logon        Login failed. The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Windows authentication. [CLIENT: xx.xx.xx.x]

Then logged to both servers using service accounts to make sure Service account is working fine. From Primary server both DB instances were accessible from DR server Primary instance was not accessible.

This gave a hint of confidence that I am on right path and helped to fix the issue.

Possible solutions are:

1.       If the service account password is changed make sure to update on both SQL Servers and restart the Services this should solve if issue is related to service account password.

2.       Sometimes this might not resolve the issue. If your hosted on complex domains like what happened in this case. Servers were hosted on different domain and service accounts used were from different domain. To fix this we have make sure proper trust is established between these two domains so that authenticity of the service account can be validated. This will be taken care by AD admins. This helped resolve the issue.

Hope this helps someone like me 😊.