Last fall, I spoke at the SSWUG Virtual Conference and had a really good time with it, so I signed up again to do the Spring SSWUG Virtual Conference too.
Here’s how it works: I fly out to Tucson to record my sessions in SSWUG’s sssswanky TV studio ahead of time, and then you can watch [...]
Ah, spring – that time of year when young men’s thoughts turn to T-SQL. The next SSWUG V-Conference will be April 22-24th, and I’ll be giving a few sessions:
Log Shipping To The Cloud (300-level)
In an ideal world, we’d have a standby SQL Server in a disaster recovery datacenter, but we can’t always afford that luxury. [...]
This week I presented at the SSWUG Virtual Conference on how to benchmark your storage performance with Microsoft’s SQLIO utility. Last week I talked about running SQL Server in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Take those two things together, and we’ve got storage benchmarking on Amazon EC2 servers:
Maximum write speed: 68 MBs/sec
Maximum read speed: 8 [...]
Sometimes you need an offsite database server in case something goes wrong, but you can’t afford a full-blown disaster recovery datacenter. Or maybe you’ve got some ideas that you’d like to try out with a big SQL Server 2005 box, but you don’t have the hardware sitting around idle. Or maybe you’d just like to [...]
You can now spin up a virtual server in Amazon’s datacenter with Windows running.
Even better, you can spin up a fresh new SQL Server for around $1 per hour.
Amazon Web Services Blog announcement on Windows support
Amazon EC2 description with Windows and SQL Server pricing
And of course, this comes on a day when I just told [...]
A lot of cool things are happening at PDC this year, and Amazon’s already showing their cards: Amazon EC2 will offer Windows hosting.
That means you can turn on a brand new Windows machine – or ten – and pay by the hour according to the capacity you’re using. Less than a dollar an hour in [...]
I don’t have much insight to add here, but it’s something my readers are probably into: Oracle now supports running on Amazon EC2. They’ve got prebuilt EC2 instances that you can just turn on, a cloud management portal, and licensing options.
This is such a cool time to be a database administrator. I can’t wait for [...]
I blogged about why database administrators should use Twitter, and I personally loved that tool. It helped people build faster personal connections with each other, and it helped you get a picture of what the brilliant people were thinking at any given time. Take Brian Knight, a SQL Server guru, for example – I love [...]
Amazon just announced EC2, their rent-a-datacenter plan. You build a custom virtual machine using their tools, and upload it to them. Then you can turn on that virtual machine anytime you want for a whopping ten cents per hour.
It gets even better – if you have scalability needs, like if your site suddenly [...]
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 »