What’s the plan when you don’t know how to fix a production issue? You can prepare this situation by reading and keeping up to date. But when you’re sweating behind a keyboard, you haven’t moved out your chair for 4 hours and you’re being chased for an update, what do you do?… I thought I’d list a few thoughts on this.

Articles & Blogs

If you’re left searching the web for a solution during a change window, there’s a good chance the best call for action is to proceed with your back-out plan. If it’s an unplanned outage, things might be different.

The main consideration here is that you need to be able to trust that what you’re reading is technically accurate, but you’ll never truly know how something is going to work until you have tested it yourself. There’s always going to be hidden gotya’s!

See my other page, SQL Server Links & Tools, which includes a big list of amazing contributors within the data platform community.

Microsoft SQL Server Documentation

Microsoft’s official documentation, AKA the user manual:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/sql-server-technical-documentation/
I think I spotted a troll on this pages comments. Win2000 on a year 2018 comment? (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
And lastly, here’s a link to Microsoft’s own blogging space.
http://blogs.msdn.com

Microsoft Customer Support Services

You will have to pay for support on a case-by-case basis, unless the problem is due to a bug in the product. Support cases are prioritised like in any IT environment, so if a production server is down the case will likely be marked as Priority 1 by the agent.

You may be asked to send SQLDIAG or PSSDIAG data. These are tools used to collect and analyse data to identify performance root causes. I had no idea what this was until I saw it mentioned in this book by Jonathan Kehayias and Ted Krueger.

Troubleshooting SQL Server, A Guide for the Accidental DBA

This is a free book given out on Red-Gate’s website. It’s crazy how decent the SQL Server community is. There’s also an Amazon link if you prefer a hard copy. It doesn’t dive into SQLDIAG/PSSDIAG’s but if you’re reading this and want proper information, have a look!

Hire a Consultant

Perhaps you need someone in to fill a technical gap for an on-going project, or just need a server optimised so you can sleep at night. Usually this is a decision based on budgets and a big consideration is who are you going to hire?