Thursday, March 29, 2012

Correct Way to Reboot a SQL Server

When you guys perform a regular reboot of your production SQL Servers,
do you just use the Start button and Shutdown/Restart? Or do you stop
SQL Server first, then reboot the server?
Stopping SQL Server first, then rebooting the server, has always
seemed obvious to me. My boss wants to just use the Start button and
reboot the boxes, because this has never caused us any problems, and
will save the time of taking the extra steps to stop SQL Server first.
Now that I'm looking for it, I can't find one clear bit of Best
Practice documentation on this!
Thanks much!
I tend to just reboot the servers , this has always worked fine for me on
hundreds of servers big and small.
HTH
Jasper Smith (SQL Server MVP)
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community for SQL Server professionals -
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"James" <throwawaythrowaway@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:27d8ba57.0405171047.4d8b8067@.posting.google.c om...
> When you guys perform a regular reboot of your production SQL Servers,
> do you just use the Start button and Shutdown/Restart? Or do you stop
> SQL Server first, then reboot the server?
> Stopping SQL Server first, then rebooting the server, has always
> seemed obvious to me. My boss wants to just use the Start button and
> reboot the boxes, because this has never caused us any problems, and
> will save the time of taking the extra steps to stop SQL Server first.
> Now that I'm looking for it, I can't find one clear bit of Best
> Practice documentation on this!
> Thanks much!
|||James,
I have never needed to do a regular reboot of a SQL Server since Windows
2000, unless I have changed some hardware or installed software that
required a reboot. NT4 was a little different...
If the server is a dedicated server and there are no other applications on
there, then Shutdown should work fine without having to stop the service.
Remember to stop application services on your application servers before
rebooting SQL Server, it will be cleaner.
Mark Allison, SQL Server MVP
http://www.markallison.co.uk
Looking for a SQL Server replication book?
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602.html
"James" <throwawaythrowaway@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:27d8ba57.0405171047.4d8b8067@.posting.google.c om...
> When you guys perform a regular reboot of your production SQL Servers,
> do you just use the Start button and Shutdown/Restart? Or do you stop
> SQL Server first, then reboot the server?
> Stopping SQL Server first, then rebooting the server, has always
> seemed obvious to me. My boss wants to just use the Start button and
> reboot the boxes, because this has never caused us any problems, and
> will save the time of taking the extra steps to stop SQL Server first.
> Now that I'm looking for it, I can't find one clear bit of Best
> Practice documentation on this!
> Thanks much!
|||You can just reboot the server. When Windows does a normal shutdown, it
first stops all running services, including SQL server.
"James" <throwawaythrowaway@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:27d8ba57.0405171047.4d8b8067@.posting.google.c om...
> When you guys perform a regular reboot of your production SQL Servers,
> do you just use the Start button and Shutdown/Restart? Or do you stop
> SQL Server first, then reboot the server?
> Stopping SQL Server first, then rebooting the server, has always
> seemed obvious to me. My boss wants to just use the Start button and
> reboot the boxes, because this has never caused us any problems, and
> will save the time of taking the extra steps to stop SQL Server first.
> Now that I'm looking for it, I can't find one clear bit of Best
> Practice documentation on this!
> Thanks much!
|||I know everyone does it this way (just reboots), and in hundreds of
reboots, I've never had anything happen, as far as I know. My thought
is, you can just shutdown the O/S, and let the Service Control Manager
send a shutdown request to the SQL server service (as well as all the
other services), which attempts an orderly shutdown (logins disabled,
sql statements allowed to finish, and database checkpoints). But as I
understand, if this doesn't happen in 20 seconds (with SQL Server
competing with all other services shutting down during this time), the
SCM kills the service, so on restart SQL Server not only has to
rollback uncompleted transactions, but may have torn pages.
If anybody can shoot this concern out of the water, I'll be glad to
hear it, as just rebooting the server without doing anything else is a
bit easier!
Thanks
"Rick White" <name=rick@.domain=whiteconsulting.TLD=biz> wrote in message news:<u#YPFoJPEHA.2976@.TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl>...[vbcol=seagreen]
> You can just reboot the server. When Windows does a normal shutdown, it
> first stops all running services, including SQL server.
> "James" <throwawaythrowaway@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:27d8ba57.0405171047.4d8b8067@.posting.google.c om...
|||You are mostly correct, but your concern about torn pages is largely
unfounded. Torn pages occur when Windows "thinks" data has been written to
disk, but in fact it has only been written to a disk cache when the power
fails. If your disk cache doesn't have a battery backup there would likely
be some pages that are partially written to disk and thus inconsistent.
I normally shut down SQL Server by itself to avoid unnecessarily long
recovery times and forcing a rollback on transactions that should be
committed etc...
"James" <throwawaythrowaway@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:27d8ba57.0405180616.2eb650db@.posting.google.c om...
> I know everyone does it this way (just reboots), and in hundreds of
> reboots, I've never had anything happen, as far as I know. My thought
> is, you can just shutdown the O/S, and let the Service Control Manager
> send a shutdown request to the SQL server service (as well as all the
> other services), which attempts an orderly shutdown (logins disabled,
> sql statements allowed to finish, and database checkpoints). But as I
> understand, if this doesn't happen in 20 seconds (with SQL Server
> competing with all other services shutting down during this time), the
> SCM kills the service, so on restart SQL Server not only has to
> rollback uncompleted transactions, but may have torn pages.
> If anybody can shoot this concern out of the water, I'll be glad to
> hear it, as just rebooting the server without doing anything else is a
> bit easier!
> Thanks
> "Rick White" <name=rick@.domain=whiteconsulting.TLD=biz> wrote in message
news:<u#YPFoJPEHA.2976@.TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl>...[vbcol=seagreen]

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