The Coeo Blog

Joe Pollock

I am a Principal DBA in the Managed Services team at Coeo, and have been working with SQL Server since 1998 in a variety of roles including developer, DBA, and consultant. My main interest now is in teaching DBA and T-SQL skills, and writing training materials to assist this. At Coeo we see such a wide variety of systems and problems, so that every day there is the chance to learn and pass this knowledge on both internally and as part of training courses.

Does SQL Server Lose an Hour of Sleep?

At the start of Daylight Saving Time (DST), which is this weekend in the UK, the clocks will move forward by one hour at 1am. Apart from the fact that we all lose an hour of our night’s sleep, what effect will this have on your scheduled jobs in SQL Server?

SQLBits 2022 session - Field Testing Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution

As far as maintenance solutions for SQL Server instances are concerned, those based on Ola Hallengren's scripts work beautifully out of the box. They have also transformed many a SQL Server and boast an impressive track record. Nevertheless, a critical question arises: How do you get the best out..

Does SQL Server Get An Extra Hour In Bed?

Many countries follow the standard of Daylight Saving Time (DST), where twice each year, the clocks will move either forward or backwards by one hour to maximise the evening daylight in the spring, summer, and autumn months. For countries that follow this, there is a specific side-effect of this..

Killing Your SQL Server with Kindness

When you discover a poor, uncared for SQL Server instance that has been neglected for years, your immediate response is to get maintenance going and give it some love. Get it back to its former glory and running optimally.

But you need to approach this with caution.

SQL Agent history - A most confusing dialog box

On a new installation of a SQL Server instance, by default, SQL Agent will automatically manage the job history retention, however this may not work the way you expect it to. This post explains why, and how you should set this up for best results.

First Fix and Second Fix

When DBAs are troubleshooting issues, solutions are sometimes applied in the heat of a critical incident which solve the problem, which are then walked away from because the issue has been “fixed”. With experience and a better understanding of the broader issue of long-term solutions, you realise..

Understanding COPY_ONLY backups

When you have a database which has just been created and is in the FULL recovery model, or you have an existing database you are changing from SIMPLE to FULL, you need to take a full backup before you are able to take log backups, as there needs to be a starting point for the log chain. There is a..

What happens when TempDB grows?

The TempDB database is special in many ways, but an interesting aspect is that when its files automatically grow when they become full, this growth is not persisted and will be undone on the next restart of the SQL Server service. We can see how this works by looking at two system tables:..