Sometimes less is more – and indexes are definitely one of those times. Learn how to identify overlapping indexes and why they’re so bad for performance, and learn about SQL Server 2005’s new INCLUDE feature.
Sometimes less is more – and indexes are definitely one of those times. Learn how to identify overlapping indexes and why they’re so bad for performance, and learn about SQL Server 2005’s new INCLUDE feature.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) can do multipathing, but what does that really mean? I explain the differences between failover and performance load balancing, and talk about why active/active multipathing isn’t what it seems.
In the beginning, God made drives directly attached to our computers. Over time, man decided to get jiggy with it and use Storage Area Networks. Learn why pathing is so important to these two systems.
Richard Jones, a DBA in the UK, asked in with a question, and rather than giving my own opinion, I thought it’d be better to ask it here to get everybody’s opinion in the comments:
The DB team that I am a member of are about to take control of a number of SQL Server boxes [...]
All kinds of webcasts and presentations coming up in the next couple of weeks:
May 14 – Quest Pain of the Week Webcast:
Developing Something for Nothing
Join SQL Server expert Brent Ozar and SQL Server developer Jeremiah Peschka in this webcast, as they discuss the free tools available to you to build solid, robust applications for free. They [...]
Sounds simple, right? Just grab the max. But what if you want to use a single T-SQL operation to fetch the most recent record and some of its attributes?
StorminSpank asked:
@BrentO SQL Question. 4 columns, ID, Date, Info1, Info2. ID has multiple entries. Want Latest Date for Distinct ID, but also info1 and 2.
Let’s say our [...]
Wondering whether or not you should get certified on something?
Experience is cake, certifications are the icing.
It’s hard to sell icing without cake. Yes, there are some people who like to eat icing by itself, but frankly, those people are freaks. They’re not healthy. Something is wrong with them.
If you take an easy-to-get certification into a [...]
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 [...]
It’s tough for us SQL Server DBAs to get training.
Developers can get mentored by a more senior developer because it’s rare to have just one developer at a company: odds are, there’s a more senior person just down the hallway or in the next cube over. Junior developers can ask ‘em questions, learn by reading [...]
A reader asked a great question, and I just had to share it in a more general form because it applies to so many of us production database administrators.
He’s currently a production SQL Server DBA, and his company’s bringing in a new application with a SQL Server back end. He’s doing a good job as [...]
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 »