I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons growing up, and part of the game involves building your character. You picked a class like thief, cleric, fighter, and so on, and your choice determined the strengths and weaknesses of your character. Your character’s Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, and Intelligence scores were affected by your class. [...]
Here’s how to tell when you should learn NUMA.
Say you’ve got an IBM 3950, a high-end rack-mount server with 4 sockets, 4 cores each (16 cores total) and 64 gigs of memory. If you’ve got several of these servers, you can connect them together via a daisy chain. IBM makes a special interconnect cable that [...]
One of the classic lines from the movie Fight Club is:
“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!”
Tom LaRock (Blog – @SQLRockstar) used this line (and many others) to explain what happens at the [...]
I know kung fu.
Okay, maybe not, but day one of my Microsoft Certified Master training for SQL Server was pretty darned cool. I arrived to find my name on a spot in the classroom, plus my very own swag! We got:
A t-shirt that says “Microsoft Certified Master” – which I refuse to wear [...]
Tomorrow is the first day of school.
I wasn’t all that fond of school, if I’m honest. My most vivid recollection of high school is that I constantly forgot my locker combination. I kept having to go to the office for them to remind me, and it got so bad that the secretary knew my combination [...]
When I write blog posts or presentations, I want to write posts that will impress people. I want people to say, “Wow, that guy’s a rocket surgeon. He really knows his stuff. He’s working on the cutting edge.” I’ve talked to other people who want to get started blogging or presenting, and they usually have [...]
Meetings are like bad blocking queries – they tie up precious resources and stop other people from getting work done. Today, let’s talk about how to optimize both of ‘em by doing homework ahead of time and minimizing the number of objects in the transaction.
The Professional Association for SQL Server recently sent its members a survey asking where they should hold their next summit – in Seattle again, or rotate it around the country. Initially we heard that the results wouldn’t be posted for a variety of reasons, but the PASS Board of Directors heard the community loud and [...]
Solid state drives (SSDs) have gotten a lot of press because they can be dramatically faster than magnetic hard drives. They use flash memory instead of spinning magnetic platters. Since any bit of memory can be accessed at any time without moving a hard drive’s head around, SSD random access is insanely fast.
How fast are [...]
Did you miss the free all-day webcasts I did with Kevin Kline and Ari Weil on how to use DMVs to troubleshoot and tune your SQL Servers? Good news – the archives are now online!
You can access the videos, slide decks, links, scripts, and more for free at QuestKB.com/Live.
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.
Read More »Erika’s friends call her “Fancy Feast” because she only likes the best things in life. She’s got champagne tastes, but we can’t afford to buy the best of everything. I recently picked up a coffee table from Ikea, and it got me thinking about SQL Azure.
In a perfect world, I’d have on-premise SQL Server for every database. I’d use cutting-edge storage and cluster everything. But this isn’t a perfect world…
Read More »I get a lot of questions from people who want to get a better job. They want to know if certification, training, or branching out will help them get the job of their dreams. These things just aren’t the real answer.
The answer is simple: the Buddy System. Learn why.
Read More »In high school, I threw a huge party in Grandma’s house. It had long-lasting implications – among other things, I got disinherited.
Learn why SQL Server data compression has a lot in common with me after that Jungle Juice bash.
Read More »When my Grandpa Ozar wanted to find out if his 10 megabyte 5.25″ hard drive was responding fast enough to handle his database loads, he monitored the Perfmon counter Physical Disk: Disk Queue Length.
Things have changed since Grandpa’s time, though, and now it’s time to learn a new performance tuning trick – SQL Server waits.
Read More »