Storage errors do not always surface as immediate failures. When SQL Server encounters an 823, 824, or 825 error reading or writing a database page, it records the offending page in msdb.dbo.suspect_pages — a system table that accumulates page-level I/O failures across service restarts. Querying this table is the …

Storage budgets shrink faster than databases grow. Uncompressed tables and indexes often carry two to four times the physical page count that row or page compression would require — a gap that widens with every batch load or continuous INSERT. sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats joined to sys.partitions surfaces every …

A query that ran in milliseconds last month now scans a million rows and spills to tempdb. Nothing changed in the code — but the data grew, and the statistics the optimizer relies on went stale, so its row estimates drifted far from reality and it chose a bad plan. Refreshing statistics is the fix, and knowing how and …

Every SQL Server instance ships with a parallel command vocabulary that never appears in an ORM, a stored procedure, or an application query: the DBCC statements. They validate physical page structure, reclaim file space, evict cached plans, reseed identity columns, and report internal counters that no SELECT exposes — …

Corruption rarely announces itself. A bit flips on a SAN, a controller loses power mid-write, a driver mishandles a flush — and the damaged page sits unread for weeks until a query finally touches it and the database throws error 824. By then the corruption may already be inside every backup you keep. DBCC CHECKDB is …

A one-time data load doubled a data file overnight, the load is done, the rows are deleted, and the file is now mostly empty space. The reflex — reach for DBCC SHRINKDATABASE and give the disk back — is one of the most common self-inflicted performance wounds in SQL Server administration. This post explains exactly …

Open the SQL Agent job history on an instance that has been running for a decade and you will still find DBCC DBREINDEX in a nightly maintenance step, quietly doing its job. It works — which is exactly why nobody has touched it. But it has been deprecated for the better part of twenty years, it locks tables it does not …

Duplicate and overlapping indexes waste storage, slow down every write, and split optimizer statistics across redundant copies. This T-SQL script compares each non-heap index in the current database on its first sixteen key columns and surfaces any pair of indexes that overlap, giving the DBA a short list of cleanup …

Excessive virtual log files (VLFs) inside the transaction log slow down database recovery, backup, and restore operations — often by minutes on large logs — and the problem compounds silently every time autogrowth fires with a small increment. This script queries DBCC LOGINFO across every online database on the …

Running DBCC CHECKDB on every database is one of the most important tasks for a SQL Server DBA. But in busy environments it is easy to lose track of which databases have been checked recently and which have not. This script loops through all user databases, reads the last known good DBCC CHECKDB date from each one, and …