Year: 2014

You love Q&A sites like StackOverflow.com and DBA.StackExchange.com, but sometimes it’s hard to find interesting questions that need to be answered. So many people just sit around hitting refresh, knocking out the new incoming questions as soon as they come in. What’s a database person to do? Use the power of the SQL. Data.StackExchange.com lets…

Teaching Tips: Help Your Audience Be Active Learners

Last Updated August 15, 2024

Writing and Presenting

Brent uses handouts to get his audience to optimize queries as part of his presentation We teach a lot of courses. In addition to our online training, free webcasts and sessions at major conferences, we also teach mult-day events. It’s incredibly valuable to keep your audience active. Even when you’re working in a lecture format,…

Oracle Backup Basics for SQL Server DBAs [Video]

Last Updated August 22, 2014

Oracle

To get ready for Tuesday’s webcast, here’s what you have to do: Watch the video below, but watch it today (or over the long weekend). There will be no live presentation this week and we won’t be rehashing all of the material in the video. Write down your questions or comments. (You don’t have to do…

I’m Speaking at kCura Relativity Fest 2014 about SQL Server

Last Updated February 9, 2017

kCura Relativity, SQL Server

I’m very proud to announce that kCura selected me to speak again this year at Relativity Fest, the annual gathering of e-discovery professionals. I’ve been doing a lot of Relativity work (here’s a recap of my blog posts about it) and I really like working with the company and the product. Heck, I even attended…

Monitoring Oracle with Statspack

Last Updated August 13, 2014

Oracle

At some point, you’re going to need to know what’s wrong with your Oracle instance. While there are a lot of monitoring tools around, there’s always some reason why third party monitoring tools can’t be installed. Oracle has shipped with something called Statspack that provides DBAs with some ability to monitor their Oracle instance. Statspack:…

Book Review: Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware

Last Updated December 9, 2018

Book Reviews, Virtualization

tl;dr – I do not recommend this book. I was so incredibly excited when it was originally announced. A book published by VMware Press, written by prominent VMware, SQL, and storage consultants? GREAT! So much has changed in those topics over the last few years, and it’s high time we got official word on how…

Should I Run sp_recompile After I Create An Index?

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Indexing, SQL Server

Making index changes in SQL Server is tricky: you immediately want to know if the new index helped your performance and if it’s being used, but SQL Server execution plans and their related statistics can be are insanely confusing. It can be useful to run sp_recompile after you create an index, but not necessarily for the reason you might…

Watch This Week’s Webcast Today (and Win a Prize Tomorrow)

Last Updated August 19, 2014

We always like to innovate — not just with the solutions we design for our consulting customers and in how we teach, but in our free videos, too. Our YouTube channel has become super popular. Lots of folks watch the recordings of our live webcasts. We stopped recently and asked, “How can we make this even…

Developers: You Don’t Need a DBA. I’ll Prove It.

Last Updated February 12, 2017

#SQLPass, SQL Server

That’s right, you heard me, and I’ll prove it on a really big stage. I’m honored to announce that I’ll be the first speaker at this year’s 24 Hours of PASS: Summit Preview Edition. On Tuesday, September 9th, join me for my newest session: “Developers: Who Needs a DBA?” Here’s the abstract: You store data in…

Generating Identities

Last Updated August 13, 2014

The only thing you ever need to use for database identity is an IDENTITY, right? Well, maybe. There are a lot of different options and they all have different pros and cons. IDENTITY columns The default way to identify objects in SQL Server is to use an INT or BIGINT column marked as an IDENTITY. This guarantees relatively sequential numbers, barring…

#SQLPASS Speakers: Here’s How to Improve Your Session

Last Updated February 12, 2017

#SQLPass, Writing and Presenting

This year there’s a couple of special challenges you need to keep in mind for projecting your beautiful knowledge out to the audience. Fixing the Contrast Levels PASS distributes a custom PowerPoint template – looks great this year – but the contrast level is extremely light. The template uses light blue and light gray text…

Why Archive Data?

Last Updated August 1, 2014

Oracle, SQL Server

The data story so far Meet Margot. Margot is an application developer who works for a small company. Margot’s application collects and generates a lot of data from users including their interactions with the site, emails and texts that they send, and user submitted forms. Data is never deleted from the database, but only a…

Changing SQL Server Editions: Standard, Enterprise, Evaluation and More

Last Updated August 1, 2014

“Enterprise Edition was installed for SQL Server, but it turns out that we only have a license for Standard Edition. Is that an easy change?” I see this question a lot. The answer is well documented by Microsoft, but it seems to be really hard for folks to find! If you’d like to go straight…

The Top 3 Trickiest Features in SQL Server (Twitter Poll)

Last Updated July 24, 2014

I’ve worked with a lot of features in SQL Server. I know what I think is tricky and more difficult than it looks like at first. But experiences vary, right? So I asked the Twitterverse, “What are the Top 3 Trickiest Features in SQL Server?” Here’s what I heard back. #1: Replication SQL Server Replication “wins”…

Using Triggers to Automatically Add Indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Indexing, SQL Server

Let’s say you’ve got a vendor application that creates tables, loads them, queries them, and drops them all the time. You can’t change the code. The tables involved desperately need an index in order to go faster, and they’re your biggest performance bottleneck. Enter DDL triggers. Regular DML triggers fire when you insert/update/delete rows in a…

Learning By Doing: How We’re Innovating In Our Seattle Course, “Make SQL Apps Go Faster”

Last Updated August 15, 2024

A team challenge in our training in Chicago, 2013 As teachers, we’re always working to maximize the skills that students can learn in a given amount of time. Many students “learn by doing.” But what’s the best way to do this? You may immediately think of lab exercises as an option. But labs are treacherous to implement…

What’s New in Oracle 12.1.0.2?

Last Updated July 24, 2014

Oracle

Oracle 12.1.0.2 was recently released with some fanfare. One of the most talked about features is Oracle Database In-Memory, but there’s more to this release than just columnar storage. Big Investment in Data Warehousing Almost all of the new features reflect an increased focus on data warehousing. This is similar to recent SQL Server releases and, indeed, most…

Career Planning for DBAs: Your Next Two Years

Last Updated May 10, 2017

Professional Development

You’ve been doing this database thing for a while, and you’re ready to get serious about it. What’s the next step? Step 1: Define your specialty in one sentence. If you say you do everything, you compete with everyone. You want to be the only one they want. That means you’re: Actively sought-after Uniquely qualified A…

The SQL Server Components of kCura Relativity

Last Updated February 9, 2017