Month: April 2012

Things Every DBA Should Know (But Most Don’t)

Last Updated February 9, 2017

What if your boss walked up right now and asked you, “How many database servers do we have?” The classic poster Would you start sputtering, “Uh, do you mean production, or dev? Do multiple instances on a cluster count? And by the way, who’s asking?” Or would you confidently answer with an exact, unwavering number?…

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in AWS

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Always On Availability Groups, Cloud Computing

Many companies are investigating a move into cloud hosting. With the recent release of SQL Server 2012, these very same companies are also looking at a migration to SQL Server 2012 to take advantage of readable secondaries. Combining Amazon Web Services and SQL Server 2012 seems like a perfect match. Unfortunately, there are some gotchas,…

SQL Server Virtualization Q&A

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Virtualization

In my recent “Why Is My Virtual SQL Server So Slow?” webcast, we got a lot of great questions in chat. Here’s some of the highlights: Question: “Why would I virtualize a 4-core server and turn it into a 2-core VM? Doesn’t performance go down?” If you’ve got an existing physical box, and your only…

Writing Better Conference Abstracts and Presentations

Last Updated May 13, 2014

Brent Ozar

Writing and Presenting

The conference season is coming – let’s get you a speaker slot. Before you submit an abstract, do your research. Here’s some of my past posts about presentations and abstracts: How to Write a Conference Abstract – the real goals of a session abstract is to get the right people into your room and keep the…

Maintenance Plans and Roombas Suck – in a Good Way

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery

Every now and then, I hear an experienced DBA say, “SQL Server maintenance plans for backups, indexes, and statistics? What, are you kidding me? Nobody uses maintenance plans because they suck.” They say maintenance plans are so inflexible because they insist on defragging or rebuilding every index, every time, regardless of how little the table…

Breaking News: Changes to Microsoft SQL Server Certifications

Last Updated April 11, 2012

Kendra Little

Microsoft Learning published new information today which changes the certification landscape in a big way. Think you understand how to get certified? You’ve got a set of new terms and new rules to learn! I’ll give you my take on the high points here. Join us next Tuesday in our webcast to get the full…

Hash Partitioning, SQL Server, and Scaling Writes

Last Updated September 2, 2019

Jeremiah Peschka

Architecture, Partitioning

At first glance, SQL Server’s partitioning seems like it should be an easy way to solve problems inserting data into busy tables. If the writes are spread across many partitions it only makes sense that we can avoid write hot spots in SQL Server, right? The truth is much more complicated than it appears. Asking…

How to Interview Storage Vendors

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Storage

Buying SAN gear is hard work. You have to compare vendors based on performance, capacity, reliability, ease of implementation, quality of support, and of course, price. When I’m working with a client buying new storage, here’s the questions I have them ask each prospective storage vendor. Q: If we buy SSD, SAS, and SATA drives,…

How Fast Does Your SAN Need to Be for SQL Server?

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Storage

Let’s oversimplify the bejeezus out of this complex problem. Suspend your disbelief for a second and work with me: We have a database server hosting just one 100GB table. Sure, in reality, we’ve got lots of databases and lots of tables, but we’re going to keep this simple. We’ve got a simple sales table that…