SQL Server: Understanding and Using DBCC Commands

Course Overview
Hello, my name is Erin Stellato and welcome to my course SQL Server: Understanding and Using DBCC Commands. I'm a SQL Server consultant with SQL Skills as well as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. And this topic is one that I've been presenting on for several years because I find that many database administrators and database developers are familiar with three or four DBCC commands. But because of their environment or roll they don't always have the chance to work with some of the other commands until they're run into a production issue. At that moment, when your manager is upset because there's a problem and users are blaming the database for an issue with the application running a DBCC command for the first time can feel a little bit scary. You're pretty sure you know what's going to happen because you've read about the command. But until you actually run it you're holding your breathe because reading about something and thinking you know what will happen is very different than having the experience of doing it. In this course we'll review the most frequently executed DBCC commands to not just see exactly what they do, but also understand what impact if any they can have on performance, on your solution configuration, or on your data. If you work with SQL Server in any capacity, whatever your level, this course is relevant to you. Experience with TSQL commands is helpful, along with the basic understanding of how SQL Server works. I hope you'll join me as we explore the world of DBCC commands with this course SQL Server: Understanding and Using DBCC Commands here on Pluralsight.

Introduction
Hi, this is Erin Stellato from SQLskills. com, and I'm recording this course for Pluralsight. This course is about understanding and using DBCC commands, and this is module one, the introduction. I always like to start a course with at least a mention of the intention and reasoning behind why I developed the content, and we're going to go back to the basics here and talk about the primary responsibilities of a database administrator. Now, DBA tasks are varied depending on company, role, the number of DBAs, but in general DBAs are tasked with keeping the data that's in the database secure. They need to keep that information available so that users can access it, and they also must administer the application which hosts that information, which is SQL Server. So they have to manage the instance and monitor performance and ensure maintenance is done and sometimes probably help with tuning. And I want to note that this course is applicable to developers and other data professionals, and while the aforementioned tasks are not ones that a dev or other team member may be responsible for, anyone who accesses SQL Server must remember this tenet, which is, first, do no harm. And this mantra, which is really borrowed from the medical world, was the driving force behind this course. I want DBAs and devs and anyone else who's accessing a SQL Server instance and the databases to understand not just what these DBCC commands do but also their impact. So with that, let's go into what we're going to cover in this course.

Informational Commands
Hi, this is Erin Stellato from SQLSkills. com, and I'm recording this course for Pluralsight. This course is about understanding and using DBCC commands and this is module three, Informational Commands. In this module we will cover commands that won't change the configuration of our environment, but they will give us information about our environment. In some cases, very select cases, we do have the ability to reset that data which can be useful in certain scenarios, but obviously you'd need to know when, and we'll discuss that. And we'll also point out cases where the DBCC commands that exist are no longer relevant, even though they're still available and supported. But better information can be obtained from the SQL Server Dynamic Management Objects and so we'll go through that. Let's get started.

Validation Commands
Hi, this is Erin Stellato from SQLskills. com, and I'm recording this course for Pluralsight. This course is about understanding and using DBCC commands, and this is module five, Validation Commands. In this module, we're going to talk about a select set of commands that you can use to verify and validate the integrity of your data. I say select set of commands because there are many commands in the validation grouping that we will not cover. Specifically, all of those related to and including DBCC CHECKDB. So to be very clear, this includes DBCC CHECKALLOC, DBCC CHECKCATALOG, DBCC CHECKTABLE, and DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP. If you would like more information about the use of the CHECK DBB family of commands, I kind of like that, family of commands, then you want to review the two courses that Paul has on Pluralsight. Detecting and Correcting Database Corruption and Advanced Corruption Recovery Techniques. Again, I am not going to discuss this commands at all, which means this will be a pretty short module, because there's only two of the validation commands. So let's get started.