1. Defy the Defaults
Mike Hillwig
Boston, MA

2. Mike Hillwig
 AKA The Cranky DBA
 SQL Server DBA
 Working with SQL Server since SQL 7
 Senior DBA at hosting division of a financial
software company
 Resume includes Acme Packet, Shawmut
Design and Construction, Weirton Steel,
Equitable Resources

4. Obligatory Social Networking Slide
 crankydba.com
 sqlserverpedia.com
 twitter.com/mikehillwig
 anysocialmediasite/mikehillwig

5. Housekeeping
 Slides and scripts at sqlsaturday.com
 Blog post at
crankydba.com/go/defaults
 Don’t let me talk too fast
 Please complete your evaluations

6. Beware of the Blogs
 There is some  Test everything in
amazing advice out your own test
there. But… environment first.
 Anybody can put bad  I don’t trust people
advice on the internet who say “ALWAYS” or
 Trust people you “NEVER”
know
 Assume I’m an idiot

15. Today’s Agenda
 Server Configuration
 Pre-Installation
 Installation
 Database Creation
 Memory Management
 SQL Agent Jobs
 Don’t Touch That!
10/6/2012
15 | SQL Saturday 171 Pittsburgh, PA
|

16. Before You Touch the Install Media
 Look at your drive
configurations
 Have a place to put
different types of files
 Data
 Tlogs
 Pagefile
 TempDB
 Backups
10/6/2012
16 | SQL Saturday #171 Pittsburgh
|

17. Enabling Instant File Initialization
 Not exactly a SQL
setting
 Changing a default
policy object
 Allowing your service
account to Perform
Volume Maintenance
Tasks allows you to
use IFI

18. What are we installing?
 Resist the urge to
Select All
 Only install what you
need
 More options need
more resources
 Bigger surface area
means more surfaces
to attack

19. Where are we installing it?
 I don’t like installing
anything on C.
 Have a drive
dedicated to holding
binaries/applications

20. Understand the Instance Root
 This is where most of
your files will live,
including logs and
system files
 Avoid putting these in
the same place as
your binaries

21. Our First Chance to get Security Right
 Do you need mixed
authentication?
 Who will be an
administrator on this
instance?
 Use AD groups where
possible.
 Add your service
account here.

22. What Goes Where?
 Splitting things up can
be a boost to
performance
 Keep your paths
consistent
 I strongly encourage
you to put data and
backups on different
physical disks/LUNs

23. Creating a New Database
 Who owns the
database? That
account is the default
for dbo.
 Look at your initial file
sizes and growth
increments.
 If it’s going to grow,
start big out of the
gate

24. Let it Grow!
 This is one is
important to me.
 This gets changed in
every instance I
manage
 Avoid disk
fragmentation
 Can you come up
with a better default
setting?

25. Instance RAM
 MIN = 0 allows you to
get ballooned
 MAX = 2 TB allows
you to page
 Do you have any
servers with 2 TB of
RAM?
 Subtract 4-8 GB from
physical RAM as a
starting point for MAX

26. SQL Agent Job Ownership
 This is a deadly default.
 I’ve seen this one kill
servers
 If the owner is disabled,
the job stops running.
 In my environments,
this is always a system
or service account.

28. Don’t Touch That!

29. Remember this guy?

30. Auto Shrink
 Autoshrink is evil
 Don’t enable it. Ever.
 Why? Because Paul says so.
 crankydba.com/go/autoshrink

31. MAX DOP
 There is some bad information out there
about setting your Max Degrees of
Parallelism.
 Typically only needs to be changed in fringe
cases. You’re probably not a fringe case.
 If changing this setting helps, you’re probably
just masking a bigger problem with your
code.

32. “Bottom Three” Server Security Settings
 Do you understand
these settings?
 I’ve seen C2 kill
servers with
excessive logging
 I advise touching
these settings only
when you know
specifically you need
them.