While working on a case few days ago, I faced this question by customer and i found it interesting to blog about. (Today I found this in forum so finalizing and posting it). Here is the question.

I have created two node windows cluster. All disk are available in “storage” but I don’t see any option to do manual failover unless they are part of some group. How can I test if failover is working fine for disks without shutting down the node or adding them to a group.

Here is the screenshot to explain the problem better. As you can see that U and W are not part of any group defined under “Services and Applications”. So by default they are the part of “Available Storage” group.

And indeed there is no option in UI to do failover of those disks.

I spend sometime with windows team and I was able to find the answer. so here it goes.
This can only be done by command line. We need to use cluster.exe command to achieve this.

Cluster Group “Available Storage” /Move:NodeName

In above command NodeName is optional. If you have two nodes, it would move storage automatically to other node.

Hope this would help someone in the world!

Cheers,
Balmukund Lakhani
Twitter @blakhani

Sometime I have been asked that how to find out who dropped/altered/created table/stored procedure. Well, SQL 2005 has out-of-the-box solution to this problem. This works in SQL 2008 as well.

Schema Change History is the report which would give details. This report takes data from default trace which is enabled by default in SQL Server 2005 default installation. Below command will help you in finding current status.

USE master;
EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced option’, ‘1’;
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
EXEC sp_configure ‘default trace’;
GO

If its enabled you would see run_value as 1.

More about default trace can be read here

If you want to see who dropped a database, you can right click on Server Icon and go to Reports > Standard Reports > Schema Changed History. This Reports output would changed based on where you right clicked it (on server icon or database name)

Since default trace will be maximum 100 MB in size you may not get the data which is pretty old. Every restart also creates new file. So, if your SQL Server has restarted five times after someone dropped the object, you will not be able to see it here.

SQL Server 2005 has many other “Standard Reports” which can be found in SQL Server Management Studio.

Enjoy!!!

<Tags> Who dropped my database, when database was dropped, someone deleted database objects, tables, procedures, list of dropped objects in SQL Server 2005, Schema Change history Report, see who dropped databases, how to find who dropped the database in SQL server 2005 objects dropped</Tags>

Cheers!
Balmukund