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 …

A logging table grew to forty million rows, the bulk of it was archived out, and now only the last week's data remains — but the next insert still gets identity value 40,000,001, leaving a vast gap below it. Or a botched data load left the seed sitting far above the real maximum, and future inserts skip millions of …

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 …

Backup compression reduces the on-disk size of SQL Server backup files and can significantly shorten backup duration by reducing the amount of data written to disk. This post shows how to enable compression at the server level, verify the setting is active, and confirm compression ratios from backup history using the …

Query Backup Duration and File Size from SQL Server History This script queries SQL Server's msdb backup history to report the backup type, start and finish time, duration in minutes, and file size in both megabytes and gigabytes for every backup across all user databases on the server. Purpose and Overview Knowing …

Report SQL Server Agent Job Status and Failure History This script queries the SQL Server Agent job history stored in msdb to produce a detailed report of each job's most recent run status, failure and success counts over the last 60 days, total lifetime run counts, and job step information including subsystem type and …

Kill SQL Server Sessions with Targeted Filters Using KILL and dm_exec_sessions This article covers a practical T-SQL script that kills one or more SQL Server sessions (SPIDs) while giving you precise control over which sessions are targeted. The script uses sys.dm_exec_sessions to query active sessions and a cursor to …