Month: December 2013

Top 10 Signs Your SQL Server is Neglected

Last Updated February 13, 2017

“That’s an interesting configuration you’ve got there.” Sometimes you see someone with toilet paper sticking to their shoe, their shirt tucked into their underwear, or badly in need of a tissue to get rid of whatever that is hanging out of their nose. It’s only right to find a discreet way to let them know…

How to Cache Stored Procedure Results

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

SQL Server, T-SQL

Say you run an online store, and on each item’s page, you need to show related items that people purchased. Let’s take an Amazon page for my favorite rechargeable AA batteries: Frequently Bought Together In a perfect world, we would cache this data in the web/app tier – but back here in the real world,…

Meet Doug Lane (Video)

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Company News, SQL Server

Our mysterious employee #2 – where did he come from? How did he get into SQL Server? What does he want to learn in his first year at work with us? The answers to those questions, and more, will reveal themselves in this webcast recording:

Q: Can High MaxDOP make a query SLOWER?

Last Updated December 21, 2013

Kendra Little

SQL Server

Answer: Yep, sometimes it can. I used to think that higher degrees of parallelism followed a law of diminishing returns– you could add more threads, but the benefits would taper off. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Microsoft’s recommendation to be careful when setting maxdop to values over 8 is a warning worth heeding.…

Vote for yourself in the new Tribal Awards.

Last Updated December 20, 2013

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

When you vote for us in Simple Talk’s new Tribal Awards, you’re voting for yourself. Best Free Script – sp_Blitz® – Sure, I started this all by myself a few years ago, but it’s grown into something huge. Scroll down through the change log and get a load of the dozens of contributors who have helped…

How Would You Change Windows Azure SQL Database?

Last Updated December 12, 2013

Brent Ozar

Cloud Computing, SQL Server

This artist formerly known as SQL Azure is a cloud service something akin to Microsoft SQL Server. SQL Azure is still under legal drinking age. When it first came out, it had a lot of challenges – a small subset of T-SQL commands and datatypes, inability to take backups, and absurdly small database sizes. But much…

Auto-Scaling SQL Server Always On Availability Groups with Virtualization

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Virtualization

Time for a thought exercise. Thought exercises are hard. You’ve got a database application that has bursty and unpredictable loads. Out of nowhere, you’ll suddenly get socked with a large amount of SELECT queries. Due to the way the app is written, you can’t cache the query results – the queries keep changing, and the business…

RECOMPILE Hints and Execution Plan Caching

Last Updated April 2, 2021

Kendra Little

Execution Plans, Parameter Sniffing

The DBA version of an XKCD classic. When you identify that parameter sniffing is a problem, you need to test whether implementing ‘recompile’ hints will help plan quality. (Not sure what parameter sniffing is? Learn from this blog post or this 50 minute free video.) You must decide: what hint or command do you use,…

The Four Answers To “How Big Is Your SQL Server?”

Last Updated December 8, 2013

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

Wanna know where you fit in relation to someone else? Get the answers to these questions. Now that’s a big trophy. 1. How many SQL Server instances do you have? The pro folks use the word “instances” rather than servers because clusters may have multiple SQL Server instances per node. 2. How many DBAs work…

Always On Availability Groups, Backup Checksums, and Corruption

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server

The latest version of sp_Blitz® alerts you if you haven’t been using the WITH CHECKSUM parameter on your backups. This parameter tells SQL Server to check the checksums on each page and alert if there’s corruption. But what about corrupt backups? Books Online says: NO_CHECKSUM – Explicitly disables the generation of backup checksums (and the validation…

Keep it Constrained

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Indexing, SQL Server

SQL Server has this fancy feature called constraints. Database constraints are used to restrict the domain (the range of allowed values) of a given attribute. That’s just a funny way of saying: through a set of carefully crafted rules, we control the shape of our universe. Our Test Table We’re going to be testing with…

Interview with Me on SQL Server Radio

Last Updated December 9, 2013

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

At SQL Rally Amsterdam, I sat down with Matan Yungman for a half-hour interview for the SQL Server Radio Podcast. The podcast is usually in Hebrew, but Matan was nice enough to let me stick with English, heh. Matan and I had a great time. He came with a list of really good questions, and he…

The Evolution of the Company Logo

Last Updated May 7, 2020

Brent Ozar

Company News, Consulting

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a subtle change to our site, swag, and PowerPoint templates over the last few months. Here’s the evolution as seen in our company coffee mugs: Brent Ozar Unlimited® Caffeine Delivery Devices Far left, the one with the heart, is the current one, but the transition is a funny story. Our…

Database Administrators are Plumbers

Last Updated November 29, 2013

Jeremiah Peschka

SQL Server

It seems a like a stretch. After all, plumbers get called when sinks are running backwards and when toilets and drains are clogged. But, really, the users and developers do the same thing with DBAs that you do with a plumber – when something is broken, we get the call. Unclog Your Database Fast The…