Enabling Growth Through Performance
Enabling Growth Through Performance

Posts Tagged ‘sysadmin’

Mapping a Drive with XP_CMDSHELL

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tricks that’s not talked about much: mapping a network drive under the SQL Server account. You see, mapped drives are “per user” – so if you map one on the SQL server, then SQL server can’t see it. Likewise, if you map one for SQL…

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Enable and Disable xp_cmdshell

xp_cmdshell is one of those somewhat hidden gems/power-tools in SQL Server that can both make life easy and very insecure all at the same time. You see, this function allows any SQL Server administrator to run any command/program/shell-script/batch-file that the SQL Server account has access to. It seems counter-intuitive at first but I’ve seen this…

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Cost Threshold for Parallelism and MAXDOP

There are a lot of “most overlooked” configuration settings in SQL Server, but I’m going to cover these two alone since they are quite closely related: Cost Threshold for Parallelism and Max Degree of Parallelism. What’s all this about? First let’s discuss Degree of Parallelism in its most simple form. When given a task to…

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