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 may have [...]
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 hard drives. Brent’s a cheerleader for dedicated configurations where the arrays are separated [...]
A reader wrote in and asked:
We’re running SQL Server with blades and a NetApp SAN. We have a few hundred databases from 100mb to 200gb. All data, logs, tempdb, etc. are located in the same 30-disk pool.
Apparently this was setup using NetApp’s guidelines. NetApp recommendations are to put everything in one aggregate, or a couple [...]
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.
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