I wanna start off by saying that I like what Microsoft has been doing with the setup process ― it made a lot of sense to add the tempdb configuration screen, and having a checkbox to turn on Instant File Initialization was amazingly helpful.
Even in the cloud, people still need to install SQL Server, and even in the cloud, not everyone installing SQL Server is a DBA.
It helps to have a setup checklist like the one we put in theFirst Responder Kit if you fall into that category.
DBAs who have to install SQL Server a lot may have a post-install script they run. In the age of, well, pick any from a long list of buzz words: DevOps, containers, Docker, Kubern-whatever, it sucks to have another moving part that might fail or break.
Modest ProposalDo for basic sanity settings what’s already happened for tempdb and IFI.
What’s a basic sanity setting?
Cost Threshold for Parallelism MAXDOP Max Server Memory Enable the DACAt the very least, these are settings that should be in front of people when they’re setting up a server.
If you wanna get extra fancy, you could even let people tweak settings to the model database like autogrowth and recovery model, and setup database mail and alerts.
Death Of The Boring DBAThe cloud is great, and the automation that Microsoft is building sure is nifty, but people still struggle with very basic setup items.
This post might look like dinosaur bones in a few years, but quite often a lot of problems stem from not taking care of the broom and dustpan stuff up front, and not going back to check on things later.
During consulting engagements, it’s really common to hear stuff like “I thought we did that” or “that’s the default so we left it” in really important places.
Thanks for reading!
Brent says:I’d really, really love to see a step in the setup wizard that offers to set up backups and corruption checking. These are table stakes for building a reliable server. I’m stunned by how oftenSQL ConstantCare customers are struggling with these basics.