When joining multiple tables together in a query, use aliases every time on every field. Say we've got two tables, Customers and Salespersons. The Customers table has a PreferredSalespersonID field that identifies who their normal sales rep is, and that lets us quickly grab the right salesperson when a customer calls in. We want to display ...
Linked servers let users query different database servers from a central SQL Server. Some uses for this might be: DBA utility scripts - from a central repository server, we could query all of the servers in our environment to check for things like backup dates or configuration settings Consolidated reporting - we could gather results from multiple ...
Jason Massie and I had a steel cage blogmatch about whether to configure a SAN with shared or dedicated drives, and we both passed out for exhaustion. This debate is starting up again but with a slightly different spin: virtualization. In an environment with Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX, more than one SQL Server ...
Database administrators: are you backing up your SQL Servers to local drives? If so, you need to stop for a minute to think about a few possible side effects, and maybe think about backing up to a network share instead. Why? I'm glad you asked! Get your data off the server faster My fellow Quest SQL Server ...
Jason Massie and Brent Ozar work with SQL Server for a living and write blogs for fun, but that’s where the similarities end. Jason’s a fan of shared storage SANs: putting SQL Server data and logs on the same set of physical ...
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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