Everyone needs a distributed database right? Wrong. It’s easy to get so excited about trying out a new technology that you close your eyes to the problem you’re trying to solve. I came across a question on Stack Overflow where the poster was asking what kind of distributed database they needed. Rather than jump right…
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Availability, Data Locality, and Peer-to-Peer Replication
I want to make something clear: high availability is not load balancing. The two options don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they aren’t the same thing. Several months ago, I wrote about resolving write conflicts. Some of the approaches I mentioned for resolving write conflicts (such as taking a “last write wins” approach) involved…
A DBA’s Guide to ORMs Webcast
Developers often use tools, like Entity Framework or NHibernate, to make it easier to work with the database. These tools sometimes cause problems for developers and DBAs alike. In this talk, we’ll talk about the terminology and techniques used with an ORM. We’ll also uncover ways to help DBAs work with developers, detect problematic queries,…
Notes on Scalability
We all hope that we’re going to succeed beyond our wildest expectations. Startups long for multi-billion dollar IPOs or scaling to hundreds, or even thousands, of servers. Every hosting provider is touting how their new cloud offering will help us scale up to unheard of heights. I’ve built things up and torn them down a…
2011 Yearly Link Roundup
This year we started publishing a weekly email newsletter (subscribe) – nothing deep, just each of us writing our 3-4 favorite links from the week. We read a lot, and we thought you might like some of the same things we liked. It’s not technology-specific, just interesting stuff. To finish up 2011, here’s the most…
Silent CPU Killers
It’s always important to make sure that SQL Server is running at peak efficiency – nobody wants to waste resources. In the past we’ve concentrated on ways to reduce I/O – either network I/O or disk I/O. The increasing number of cores available in modern CPUs meant that CPU tuning wasn’t as much of a…
Coping with Change Control Video
Managing change is part of a DBA’s job. If you aren’t managing database changes effectively, though, disaster can strike. Jeremiah Peschka has worked with good and bad change management practices and even brought some awful ones under control. In this session, he introduces you to tools, tips, and techniques that will help you effectively handle…
What the Users Want: Ad Hoc Reporting
Eventually we all run into a situation that makes us cringe: the users want to design their own reports. If this were something as simple as giving users a color picker and some visual layout tools, that would be one thing. Most of the time it’s more complex. Business users know their problem domain very…
Hadoop Basics for SQL Server DBAs
Microsoft have made announcements about bringing Hadoop to Windows, but what does that mean for SQL Server? In this talk, Jeremiah Peschka will cover a the Hadoop ecosystem at a high level and discuss specific use cases for Hadoop. By the end of this talk, you should have a general idea of how different parts…
What Good is a Pig?
Data matters. Every day we generate huge volumes of data. Processing all of this data presents challenges for many people. Pig is a data flow language. It sits on top of Hadoop and makes it possible to create complex jobs to process large volumes of data quickly and efficiently. Best of all, it supports many…
