This document discusses essential database administration skills for SharePoint professionals. It covers tools like Brent Ozar's First Responder Kit and Ola Hallengren's Maintenance Solution that can help with tasks like backups, monitoring, and maintenance. The relationship between SharePoint and SQL Server is discussed, noting that SharePoint performance and high availability depend on the underlying database. Common problems faced by SharePoint DBAs like index fragmentation, transaction log growth, and unsupported database modifications are also addressed. The presentation provides tips for SQL Server configuration including memory, disk, and database settings to optimize for SharePoint workloads.

2. ESSENTIAL DATABASE ADMINISTRATION SKILLS FOR
SHAREPOINT PROFESSIONALS
Thomas Vochten
@thomasvochten

3. ♡ DIAMOND AND PLATINUM SPONSORS ♡

4. Thomas Vochten
Microsoft MVP. Technical Evangelist.
Solution advisor.
@thomasvochten
https://thomasvochten.com
mail@thomasvochten.com

5. I’m not a real DBA

6. Meet the
Involuntary DBA
Someone who is made to assume a DBA role or take
on DBA responsibilities, usually against their will
Paul Randal

8. SharePoint makes DBA’s cry

11. When we installed SharePoint
http://dbareactions.com

12. When I tell my junior
DBA, “You’d get
valuable experience if
you took over the
Sharepoint project.”
http://dbareactions.com

13. When I tell my new junior DBA he’ll be taking over the SharePoint databases
http://dbareactions.com

14. When the project manager says, “Can we put the SharePoint databases on your server?”
http://dbareactions.com

15. When I get a quarter-million-dollar budget for a new project, and it’s a Microsoft SharePoint project
http://dbareactions.com

16. When a user comes into my cube and starts complaining about SharePoint performance
http://dbareactions.com

17. When Microsoft tells me to set MAXDOP to 1 for SharePoint
http://dbareactions.com

18. Agenda
• Essential tools for the involuntary DBA
• SharePoint & SQL Server
• Frequent operational problems
• Platform setup and configuration tips

19. Your primary responsibilities as DBA
• Backups
• Reliability
• Performance

20. Show me some tools!
Let’s skip the manual…

21. Brent Ozar’s “First Responder Kit”
sp_Blitz
How am I doing?
sp_BlitzFirst
Where’s the bottleneck?
sp_BlitzBackups
How far back can I go?
Great collection of free diagnostic SQL Scripts
https://www.brentozar.com/responder/

22. Brent Ozar’s First Responder Kit
Leverage the power of the SQL community
DEMO

23. Ola Hallengren’s “Maintenance Solution”
Backups
Consistency
checks
Index
Maintenance
Free, tried & true scripts with ready-to-schedule jobs
https://ola.hallengren.com/
The industry standard. Period. Time to stop creating Maintenance Plans.

24. Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Scripts
Leverage the power of the SQL community
DEMO

25. Pro Tip
Leave a reminder for the other involuntary DBA’s

26. Free, community-driven, contributions welcome
https://dbatools.io
PowerShell Module with hundreds of cmdlets

28. dbatools to the rescue
Leverage the power of the SQL community
DEMO

29. Glenn Berry’s “Diagnostic Scripts”
Free SQL Scripts available for every SQL Server release
http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com
If you need to dig in deeper…

30. Glenn Berry’s Diagnostic Scripts
Leverage the power of the SQL community
DEMO

31. Essential Resources
Where do I go for SQL help?
• Paul Randal (blog | twitter)
• Kimberly Tripp (blog| twitter)
• Brent Ozar (blog| twitter)
• Glenn Berry (blog| twitter)

32. Get Help - Fast!
#sqlhelp on Twitter

33. The Dynamic Duo
SharePoint & SQL Server

34. Importance to SharePoint
• SharePoint performance impact
• Almost everything is stored in SQL
• Contributes to your HA/DR strategy

35. SharePoint makes DBA’s cry
• The support policies
• The strange schema
• The database settings
• The default database names
• The server rights we ask for
• The unconventional maintenance practices
• SharePoint likes to create its databases all by itself
• …

36. More frustrations…
• Auto Create Statistics = off
• Auto Update Statistics = off
• GUIDS as clustered indexes
• No real referential integrity
• Model Database is not used by SharePoint
consistently

37. Don’t
• Adding database triggers
• Adding new indexes or changing existing indexes within tables
• Adding, changing, or deleting any primary or foreign key relationships
• Changing or deleting existing stored procedures
• Calling existing stored procedures directly
• Adding new stored procedures
• Adding, changing, or deleting any data in any table of any of the databases
• Adding, changing, or deleting any columns in any table
• Making any modification to the database schema
• Adding tables to any of the databases
• Changing the database collation
• Running DBCC_CHECKDB WITH REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS
• Enabling SQL Server change data capture (CDC)
• Enabling SQL Server transactional replication
• Enabling SQL Server merge replication

38. Do
• Use the GUI
• Use PowerShell
• Use the API’s

39. Essential Reading
KB841057
supported & unsupported actions to databases
Database Maintenance for SharePoint 2010 Products
* Old, but still relevant!

40. Database, anyone?
A lot of SharePoint databases
Each with different needs

41. Even more frustrations...
GUIDS all over the place

42. Get rid of the GUID
Grey wizard
GOOD
White wizard
BAD

43. PowerShell to the rescue
Always script farm configuration
Use any script you like,
but know what it does!

44. Frequent operational problems

45. Recovery Models
Essential reading:
Understanding Logging & Recovery
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.02.logging.aspx
• Simple recovery model - last full backup
• Full recovery model - up to the minute restore

46. “Why does this log file keeps on growing?”

47. DEMO

48. Index fragmentation
Check “sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats”
Illustration by Paul Randal
* Illustration by Paul Randal

49. Reducing fragmentation
• SharePoint Health Analyzer
• Perform index maintenance manually (Ola Hallengren)
Consider rebuilding indexes when fragmented
over 30% (for content databases)

50. Only shrink files when needed
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
• Causes massive fragmentation
• Autoshrink is the root of all evil!
• Rebuild indexes & keep free space
Can be considered after special SharePoint operations like moving a site
from one database to another

51. DEMO

52. Platform setup and configuration tips

53. General considerations
• SQL is all about mem/disk IO/cpu
• Dedicate a SQL instance to SharePoint
• Go ahead and virtualize – if you know what you’re doing

54. Plan your disks
Differentiate & prioritize based on IO needs
• tempdb
• logs
• search
• other databases

55. Prepare your disks
Check/modify:
Up to 50% io performance gains measured!
Partition alignment 1024K everywhere
Allocation unit size 64K for SQL data & logs

56. Only install the feature you need:
Database Engine

57. Always use a domain user as service account
Set the SQL Server Agent to start automatically

58. Set the right instance collation for SharePoint:
Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS

59. Configure data & log file placement from the start

60. Post setup
Enable instant file initialization
From SQL 2016 on, you can do this during setup
• Speeds up data file operations enormously
• Disables zeroing out data files
• Does not work for log files
• Set “Perform volume maintenance tasks”
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175935.aspx

61. Set maximum memory

62. Turn on backup compression

63. Set “Optimize for Ad hoc Workloads” to True

64. Set Maximum Degree of Parallellism to 1

65. Setting Maximum Degree of Parallellism is mandatory in
SharePoint 2013/2016/2019

66. Database level settings
• Consider multiple data files
• Tune autogrowth settings (no %)
• Presize databases
• Don’t forget TempDB!
From SQL 2016 on, you can do this during setup

67. SQL Aliases
• Use SQL Aliases to connect SharePoint to SQL Server
• Use multiple aliases for different database types:
core farm databases
content databases
search databases
logging database

68. Resources
Best practices for SQL Server in a SharePoint Server farm
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/administration/best-practices-for-sql-server-in-a-sharepoint-server-farm
Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration for SharePoint Server
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/administration/storage-and-sql-server-capacity-planning-and-configuration
Overview of SQL Server in SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 environments
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/administration/overview-of-sql-server-in-sharepoint-server-2016-and-2019-environments
Support for changes to the databases that are used by SharePoint
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841057
Database maintenance for SharePoint
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/sharepoint-server-2010/cc262731(v=office.14)
Supported high availability and disaster recovery options for SharePoint databases
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/administration/supported-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-options-for-sharepoint-databas

69. Key Takeaways
• Leverage the power of free community tools
• Backups, backups, backups (and restores)
• Learn about what is supported and what not
• Understand how logging & recovery works
• Don’t shrink unless you know what you’re doing
• Learn about fundamental instance & database level settings

70. thank you
questions?
HTTPS://THOMASVOCHTEN.COM@THOMASVOCHTEN