Finding the Leader Blocker

October 26, 2017 Andy 12

During the course of normal processing in a database, blocking happens. Blocking is “by design” because your database is on ACID. In an OLTP database, most of your transactions are short in duration, so we expect blocking to also be short in duration. If blocking … [Read More]

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xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs alternative

February 18, 2016 Andy 3

What’s xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs? If you landed on this post, I’m guessing you know the answer to this, so I’ll be quick. xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs is an undocumented (and thus, unsupported) extended procedure that gives information on whether a job is currently running, when it last ran, when it runs … [Read More]

Formatting HTML emails in SQL

November 26, 2014 Andy 1

When I am writing monitoring/alerting stored procedures for my SQL Servers, its important to have those alerts be well-formatted. I like to minimize the amount of time I spend sorting through emails & alerts, and part of that is making sure that I can determine … [Read More]