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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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