SQLBits is a unique SQL Server event in the United Kingdom, and even if you're not in the UK, there's some things you might find interesting about how it works. Thursday - Pre-Conference Sessions - for £350, you get in-depth training on one particular subject from one trainer. Attendees like pre-con sessions when they need more ...
At #SQLbits, Jamie Thomson (Blog - Twitter) demoed the following SSIS add-ins: Kimball SDC Trace File Source XMLify File Watcher Dynamic Data Flow Rank Transform Normaliser Twitter Compression XMLify Jamie find this useful when parsing error output from other SSIS steps, which often have several result sets with different columns. XMLify dumps all of the data into a single XML file ...
At #SQLbits, Simon Sabin (Blog - Twitter) talked about car crash queries: queries that suddenly have bad performance out of nowhere, yet if you copy/paste them into SQL Server Management Studio, they run quickly. The culprit is often parameter sniffing: the engine looks at the query and builds a plan, but if ...
At #SQLBits, I was quite excited to attend this session because of the presenter. Christian Bolton of COEO (Blog - Twitter) was the head author on our upcoming book SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting, and he's one of the only 8 Microsoft Certified Masters on SQL Server that work ...
At SQLBits, MVP Jasper Smith of SQLDBATips.com held a session on what's newin SQL Server 2008 R2 for database administrators. Application and Multi-Server Management To illustrate the problem with server sprawl, Jasper gave some quick stats about a big enterprise. Microsoft IT has around 5,000 SQL Server instances with 100,000 databases, averaging CPU utilization under ...
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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