12 Days of Christmas 2011/ Syndicated

On the Seventh Day of Christmas…2011

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On the Seventh day of Christmas my Inbox Gave to Me… Seven Reports to Start My Day

Six Gb of RAM

Five Volumes Minimum…

Four Words to Live By…

Three Training Events…

Two Twitter Handles…

and Mirrored Disks with Parity

I geek out on metadata

We each have our little niche area of our jobs we enjoy.  Mine is digging into the global metadata of the SQL environment I support.  I built a quite expansive system to capture the various outcomes, durations, statuses, and sizes that combined make up the collection of SQL Servers in my domains.  Much of this grew from need as I was the only DBA for the first eight years of my DBAness.  Its through this system that I walk into my office in the morning a sit down to a freshly brewed pile of reports in my inbox ready to help me guide my day thanks to DMVs + SSIS + Catalog Views + SSRS.  These are the things I monitor.  Since it’s truly the 9th Day of Christmas and I’m two days behind I’ll explore each one in depth in a series sometime in 2012 (most likely after SQL Cruise Miami is over in February.)

1. New Databases Report – What new databases were created by whom and where in the last 24 hours?  AND WHY?

2. Failed SQL Agent Jobs Report – I want to know what jobs failed the last time they were run over the last 24 hours.

3.  Full Database Backup Report – What’s that?  I have a database that is in Simple Recovery and backup didn’t occur per it’s schedule?  TO THE DATMOBILE!

4.  Log Backup Report – See #3 and make it work for transaction log backups.  I can do all this for you Dear Readers!

5.  File Growth and Pressure Report – I want to know what files are getting close to auto-growing and also get an understanding of how much space remains on the volume they’re hosted on.  This does it for me.

6.  File Growth Detail Report – Used in conjunction with #5 I want to be able to see graphically how the files in #5 have grown or been consumed historically.  This is a drilldown of the File Growth and Pressure Report that allows me to see, both graphically and tabular, the free and used space in a given file over the last year so I can project the rate of growth into the future.

7.  Change Control Report – This is the report I’m not responsible for but a consumer of.  I need to know what is, and was scheduled in the environment and thankfully our Operations Team has this at the ready.

Curious, what reports do you have at the ready when you start work in the morning?