No computer upgrade is complete without a little blood loss. My desktop started locking up randomly today, and I realized I was using a power supply with a questionable history from Erika's old computer. I had to make yet another run out for computer gear, this time blowing $50 on a new Antec ...
My vacation memories: Frys. I've made half a dozen trips to Frys this week grabbing various little bits and pieces. My home server (which serves the web site you're looking at) was powered by a clapped-out Celeron 400, which has been replaced with a hand-me-down 800 from my desktop. I bought a new ...
All is not lost. We spent the day at Galveston, walking around the beach and shopping. Of all the shops we went into, the last place I would have expected to pick something up was Mikasa - but we got a teapot and a glass cordial decanter. I owe Erika five (now ...
So much for rest and relaxation. Everything that could go wrong, did - our flights were overbooked, the timing was wrong, and even when we'd gone home and figured the night was over, it managed to get worse - I got food poisoning. Unreal. So now I'm typing this from home, and ...
On the road again... Vacation time. After a frenzied couple of weeks, I'm ready to hit the road and relax. I won't have my laptop with me, but I'll check the site remotely and maybe post a blog or two. Been doing the Ebay thing a lot this week. Got a nifty addition ...
A few months back, Microsoft gave MVPs a few MSDN Ultimate subscriptions to pass on to community members, no strings attached. I quietly gave mine to a few deserving folks who I thought could be future MVPs, but Arnie Rowland (Blog – @ArnieRowland) had a better idea. Arnie’s Project Phoenix encourages developers to propose a [...]
Read More »A few months ago, I had The Idea. I wanted to conduct SQL Server training on a cruise ship. I emailed a few buddies and offered to start a company called SQLCruise with them, and out of three friends, only one could say yes. I don’t have anything against the two who said no. I [...]
Read More »Most SQL Server DBAs don’t even like MySQL, let alone NoSQL. They cringe when they hear people say things like, “I don’t need transactions” or “The data will eventually be consistent” or “Indexes will be supported in the next version.” SQL Server and Oracle people are constantly trying to out-feature each other, and the abject [...]
Read More »In August 2008, Lady Gaga released her premier album The Fame. This 13-track work produced several hit singles including Just Dance, Poker Face, and Paparazzi – but it also produced plenty of controversy. Her exaggerated use of fashion, musical cliches, and sex gave her plenty of media attention – both good and bad. If you’ve [...]
Read More »Pop quiz: should you be worried if your SQL Server’s page life expectancy is averaging 214? There’s only one correct answer: it depends.
Performance tuning is all about finding the RIGHT bottleneck, focusing on it, and fixing it to the application owner’s satisfaction. Learn what happens if you don’t do it right.
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