Performance Windows 98/ME When Running SQL Server

This is not a performance tip, but it resolves an irritating warning message that appears in the Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows 2000 Event Viewer logs. Have you ever seen this message: "Error 2013 - Disk Is At Or Near Capacity". This message appears when the free space on a logical disk drive gets below 10%. If your logical disk drive is over 100GB, like many of mine are, you get this message whenever free space gets below 10GB. In most cases, this error message is not really helpful, especially if you have large logical drives as I do. Fortunately, you can modify the operation system to prevent these annoying warning messages. The following works for all versions of both Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows 2000.

To make this modification, you have to manually modify the operating system's registry, using these steps:

·         Go to this registry subkey:

          HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

·         From the "Edit" menu, select "Add Value".

·         Enter "DiskSpaceThreshold" in the "Value Name" field. Don't enter the quote marks.

·         Change the "Data Type" to "REG_DWORD". Don't enter the quote marks.

·         In the "Data" field, enter the percentage value you want to use instead of the default 10%. For example, if you want to be notified (receive the warning message) when your drive has less than 5% of free space, enter a "5". Don't enter the quote marks.

Save your changes and reboot the server, and you are all done. [6.5, 7.0, 2000]  Added 12-20-2000

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Both NT Server 4.0 and SQL Server 2000 allow you to audit specific events that occur on the server, and to write these events to the Event Viewer Security log. While this can be useful if you have a security problem and want to see what is happening on your server, using auditing indiscriminately can be a performance drain, especially if you are auditing process activity of file access.

Ideally, on your production SQL Servers, auditing should be turned off. If you need to perform a security audit, then turn it on, perform the audit, and then auditing off. If your security staff mandates the use of auditing, do your best to persuade them to minimize the amount of auditing they do. [6.5, 7.0, 2000] Added 12-20-2000