This week, Brent (and only Brent) answers your questions about table partitioning, best practices for VMware configuration, rebuilding indexes, transitioning from physical SQL failover cluster to VMware or Hyper-V, database backups, security issues with cross-database chaining, and why you should never use vague adjectives when describing database sizes.

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Office Hours Webcast – 2016-10-19

Brent Ozar: All right. We might as well go ahead and get started. It’s eight minutes after the hour. Now, we’ll start going to the questions, folks. Don’t forget, get your questions in now because we may end up coming fast and furious and I just go first come, first served, so if you get them in later, you probably won’t get caught.

First question is, “We have done the table partitioning, but we did not get the performance. Why?” Yeah. That’s actually really common. Most of the times, when we see partitioning implemented, it makes queries slower rather than faster.

In order for partitioning to make your queries faster, one of two things has to happen. You either have to be loading and deleting your data at the whole partition level. Meaning, like you delete a whole partition at once, you load a whole partition at once, and you don’t have any overlap between the other partitions. If you do that, you can utilize a technique called ‘Sliding window loads’ that you let you load a separate table, and then swap in just one partition. That only makes your loads and deletes faster though. It has nothing to do with SELECT Queries.

That’s the first scenario where partitioning goes faster. The second scenario where partitioning goes faster is when your WHERE Clause in your SELECT Queries, when the WHERE Clause specifies the exact couple of partitioning keys that you use or the one partitioning key that you use so the SQL Server can narrow down your SELECT to just one partition. If SQL Server can’t do partition elimination, then you’re still scanning all of the partitions. It’s not going to be any faster. If you go to ‘Brentozar.com/go/partitioning’, we’ve got a whole series of posts explaining how you can tell whether or not your database makes sense for partitioning or not.

The big clue is if you’re doing OLTP type work, if you’re doing inserts, updates, and deletes of individual rows and your SELECTs, the WHERE clause doesn’t have your partitioning key in it, partitioning is going to make things worse instead of better.

Next up, we have a question that says, “Is there a document that outlines the best practices for VMware configuration for SQL Server?” VMware actually has several, so if you search for ‘VMware SQL Server best practices’ or ‘VMware SQL Server performance tuning’, VMware has put together several documents. The thing is you’ve got to read them with a critical eye because they’re not perfect. For example, VMwares, the last time I looked at their best practices for SQL Server, it advised you to start with single processor VMs and they mean one core. There’s a couple of big problems with this.

The first problem is if you’re licensing by VM, the smallest license you can get is four cores. Sure, you can go buy a two core pack of licenses, but the minimum you’re allowed to buy for installation is four cores, so if you’re licensing by the guest, you’re just leaving performance on the floor. The second part to that is I don’t know about you, but I like doing backups. I like doing check DB, and if I’ve only got one core, that can make it very easy for the SQL Server to feel unresponsive or overloaded when I’m trying to do say a transaction log backup which I hope to God is happening on a fairly regular basis. You have to read through these guidelines with a little bit of a critical eye and start asking questions, but they’re a great place to start, so search that just for that on VMware.

Next up, Heather says, “I have a replication question. I’m getting an error about the length of lob data to be replicated exceeds the maximum of 64K, but I’ve already configured max text replication size to negative one. Where else can I look? I’m on 2008 R2.” I actually don’t do any replication work myself at all, so I would hit good, old Books Online.

Then, if you don’t find it in Books Online, watch the slides that are rotating through on the screen. Those of you who are only listening to the podcast, you don’t have this luxury, but there’s a link on there for Stack Exchange. If you go to ‘DBA.Stackexchange.com’, there are several people on there who are great with replication. Tara Kizer, even our own Tara Kizer who’s now on the screen does a lot of replication works or has done a lot of replication work in the past. She can answer questions on there as well.

It’s funny and there are certain black holes in my knowledge area. Replication is a big one. SSIS is a big one as well. CLR is another big one.

Next question, “We have databases created from various master databases”.

Not exactly. They say “We’re looking to move to Amazon RDS. Databases that have the same family GUID isn’t allowed in RDS. Is there any way to change the family GUID?” I’ve never seen that.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that and I’ve never seen that restriction before. Do me a favor because I’m personally curious about that because I do a lot of RDS work. Email us and email us with a couple of different things. I want you to include the exact error that you get when you go to restore it over in Amazon RDS, and I’m assuming that you’re doing in a restore because that’s the only way that I would see a problem with family GUID, so yeah. Just give us the exact error. If it does turn out to be something that RDS truly doesn’t allow, the crappy way that you’d have to do it is to do an insert into the brand new database using something like SSIS or BCP.

Those are horrible options. I would much rather have you be able to do just a restore, so email us the exact error message. Don’t put it in here in the Q&A panel because I won’t be able to dig deep enough, quickly enough.

Our next question, “I rebuilt my INDEX, but it’s still fragmented”. There’s a few possible different reasons for this.

The most common one is it’s a really small object. It has less than say a hundred AK pages in it or in cases like that, SQL Server may not just be able to cram those pages absolutely full because you can’t fill up all the pages. You just don’t have that much data. It can also have to do with the size of your objects. There’s all kinds of interesting things it can have to do with.

What I would start with this, if you’re doing INDEX REBUILDs, make sure that you’re using something like Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts. Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts have a size threshold on there saying only rebuild objects over a certain number of AK pages. The other reason I’m passionate about that one is if you have an object that’s only a few hundred AK pages, it doesn’t matter whether or not the thing is fragmented. You can catch it in a RAM because it’s so tiny. Fragmentation doesn’t matter on objects that small of size.

If it’s not a small object, just off the top of my head, some of the other things that can cause for example are Heap. If you have a Heap and you’re doing ALTER INDEX REBUILD on certain versions of SQL Server, they don’t support rebuilding a Heap. I want to say it was 2008 R2 where we got ALTER TABLE REBUILD. Ola Hallengren’s scripts don’t catch Heaps. They don’t rebuild Heaps on purpose.

There are other INDEX REBUILD tools out there as well. Minion has one. MinionWare has a Minion Rebuild or the Minion Reindex that does catch Heaps, but it also has that threshold parameter for how larger objects should be.

Next up, “What is your personal recommendation for tempdb setup, multiple files or SAN versus local storage?” In terms of the number of files, the easiest way to check is in our setup guide.

If you go to ‘Brentozar.com’, then down at the bottom, there’s a form you can fill out to get all our download kits, including things like our setup guide. That way, you’ll see exactly how we recommend setting up new SQL Servers from scratch and tempdb is inside there as well. I can never remember offhand whether we have four or eight files in there that are listed and I don’t really care which one of those two you’d choose. Either four files or eight files. Then, in terms of whether I want shared or local storage, if I’m dealing with a VM, I don’t really have a choice.

It’s all going to be on shared storage. If I’m dealing with a Failover Cluster or a physical box, generally, I want cheap, local Solid State. I want cheap, local Solid Stage for two reasons. One is it keeps the SAN bandwidth clear just for user database traffic. Often, I find that that bandwidth between my SQL Server and its storage is the biggest confining factor in terms of storage performance.

Second reason for that is shared storage is a whole lot more expensive than the cheap, local SSDs you can get for servers these days. Even enterprise-grade servers are around or even enterprise-grade shared storage stuff is around a thousand dollars a terabyte. Intel’s recent PCI express cards are actually a thousand dollars for two terabytes, so it’s a pretty good steal. You can’t get shared storage that cheap.

Next up, “Could you see any performance drops on a composite primary key with four columns?” Sure.

Absolutely, and I hate the answer “It depends” because I always want you to understand what it would depend on. What it’s going to depend on is your workload, and unfortunately, that’s kind to be on the scope of something I can answer fast here. We actually have a two-hour session on that in our in person training classes. If you go to ‘Brentozar.com’ and you click on ‘Training’ up top, we’ve got whole upcoming classes in San Diego, Seattle. We’ve got one, although the Seattle one is sold out.

I believe we’ve got another one upcoming in Pittsburgh. I believe it’s Pittsburgh.

Let’s see. Next up, “Have you used either Redgate SQL Toolbelt or IDERA SQL Doctor, and is there one you like over the other?” I have a really weird job.

I love my job. It’s just weird, and because I have to constantly parachute into somebody else’s SQL Server, I can’t rely on them having tools installed and I can’t mandate that they go buy tools. Having said that, when I had a real job five years ago when I was a DBA, I liked Redgate SQL Prompt a lot. SQL Prompt is like IntelliSense but way better. For example, if I have relationships to find in the databse, SQL Prompt will automatically complete them on my joins.

It has gotten expensive. I want to say the SQL Prompt is now around 500 bucks and it’s tough for me to justify that. There are other auto complete tools out on the market these days. For IDERA SQL Doctor, it really does something very different. It does health check stuff against your database, so they’re not really inside the same market.

In terms of third part monitoring tools, the three big ones that are out there are Dell Spotlight, IDERA SQL DM, and SQL Sentry Performance Advisor. Those are the three that I place at the top tier up there. Nothing at Redgate. Just a product doesn’t have the level of guidance that I want from a monitoring tool. It just gives you a whole bunch of monitored metrics. It doesn’t tell you what’s good or bad about each metric. It doesn’t prioritize them quite the way that the other three tools do.

All three of those other tools have roughly the same performance impact. They all gather roughly the same data. They give you the same level of warnings. It’s just whichever one you’d prefer over the other. I think they’re all interchangeable at this point, and every now and then, one leapfrogs ahead of the others, and the rest of them go catch up.

Now, let’s see. Got a couple of multi-paragraph questions. We’re not going to answer those. Next one, “Are you having a sale anytime soon for the training videos?” We have our two big annual sales.

One is on our company anniversary in May, and then our other one is on Black Friday. Black Friday in November is the first Friday after Thanksgiving. It’s a big, traditional U.S. shopping holiday. On that, we’ll have some awesome, crazy deals. In the past, we’ve done stuff like five one dollar seats that people could get for our training classes, a few one dollar everything bundles, and usually, we discount classes by 50%. One day only, so you got to keep your eyes posted on your email for that.

Let’s see. Next one, “I have a two node SQL Failover Cluster and I’m migrating my workloads over to VMware. What’s the best way to do a migration from a traditional, and I’m assuming you mean physical SQL Server Failover Cluster to VMware or Hyper-V?” I don’t like doing physical to virtual, so there’s this concept of P2V where you can just simply transform a physical box up into a VM. I don’t like that for clusters.

I do like it for standalone older boxes like when I have SQL Server 2000 or 2005, but I don’t like it for modern Failover Clusters. For modern Failover Clusters, what I would prefer is go build a new VM or even if you want clusters of VMs, and then log ship from your existing physical environment over to your new virtual environment. I say log shipping. You could also do database mirroring. It’s just as good, just as effective. It gives you all kinds of ways to migrate over very quickly.

Let’s see here. “What’s the fastest and least resource-intensive way of copying very large data?” Okay. Listen here. Never use the term ‘Large’.

Don’t use big data. Don’t use fast or slow. Those are all vague adjectives. Use numbers. One terabyte, ten terabytes, a hundred terabytes, four gigabytes.

Use real numbers because what looks very large to you is every database that you’re dealing with for the rest of your life. For the rest of your life, people are going to keep giving you larger and larger databases. This is the funny thing about being a DBA. You’re always going to be faced with intimidating systems that seem large to you, and if you look around in the room, they will seem small to other people in the room, so you want to use very specific numbers in there. Now, granted, sometimes in your career after you drop a few databases, piss a few people off, maybe you’ll have to temporarily regress to a smaller database, but otherwise for the rest of your life, you’re always going to be dealing with the biggest, fastest databases you ever seen.

“What’s the fastest and least resource-intensive way of copying a lot of data with an identity field from one SQL Server database to another? Should I do bulk copies? Should I do bulk inserts?” The trick with this usually is how much downtime are you allowed to have. Normally, when I’m having to move data from SQL Server to another for some kind of migration project, they want as little downtime as possible, in which case, I want to build a change detection mechanism so that I’m syncing data in the background. Sometimes that involves adding a column with a date stamp on it as of the last time this row was changed so I can keep doing selects out, copying the data out, and only get the data that’s changed.

I prefer that much more than a big bang, like trying to shove everything across the wire as quickly as possible because often, even when I do it as quickly as possible, the stuff like BCP, the end users are still not okay with whatever the outage is.

Someone says “This tempdb is awesome”. I’m sure you mean the question, and not the answer. “I have a follow up. If you’re dealing with a Failover Cluster, can you configure your tempdb on local cheap Solid State drives?”

Yes. That has been supported since SQL Server 2012. It was even doable back in earlier versions. It just wasn’t officially supported, but it’s been supported since 2012. It’s even part of the Installation Wizard.

As you go through in step through the installation and you point tempdb over at the local drive, it just gives you a little warning in the Installation Wizard saying, “Hey, buddy. Make sure that you have the same thing over on the other node”.

Fellow human says, “Can you take a backup when the database is in read-only mode?” Yes, but you can’t take one if I remember right, when it’s in restoring, so just as long as it’s in read-only. Someone says, “I love Redgate”.

Congratulations. I love my wife. We all have our loves. Next up, “We use mount points for storing our SQL data on our instances. Is this a better solution than VMDKs for storing our data?”

It sounds like you’re using virtualization. Mount points, that typically means that you’re dealing with storage that’s attached, and I’m going to be a little vague here, over a network method, meaning like maybe you’re using I-scuzzy. Maybe you’re using Fibre Channel. These options can be better in terms of performance. They can also be worse. They can also prohibit you from doing things like Failover Clusters in some cases.

It depends on your version of VMware. Same thing with VMDKs, so it’s a little bigger of a scope. What I’d take a step back and ask, “What’s the primary problem that you need to solve? Are you facing a specific wait type in SQL Server? Are you trying to make your backups go faster? Are you settled with a specific SAN infrastructure?”

Faith, look at the problem that you’re trying to solve because the answers are always different based on the problem that you’re solving. It’s like saying “Is Chevy better or Ford?” It just depends on what the individual model that you’re looking at. Next question, “Thanks for moving the First Responder Kit to GitHub”. You’re welcome.

“I see the scripts on there are MIT used licenses. Does that include the documents and documentation in the First Responder Kit?” No. The MIT license is only for the stuff that’s in GitHub, so that’s where that piece comes from. No. You can’t take our setup checklist and edit it and put your name on it.

Next question, “I’ve installed SQL Server 2016 Development Edition on my laptop, and it freezes every time. Somebody told me that it’s because I also have 2008 R2 and 2014 installed. Is that true? I have Windows 10.” In SQL Server Management Studio, when it first came out and even until, I don’t know, say over the last few months, we’ve had a lot of reports of it freezing.

I’m the kind of guy who I really believe in VMs. That’s the same reason I use a Mac and I have since Windows Vista came out, so I don’t know. Like 2006. Everything I do is in VMs anyway because I don’t want to hose up my base OS. Whatever my base OS is, it has to work.

I have to be able to get my emails and surf my cat pictures, so I just always recommend putting SQL Server in VMs, and as long as I’m doing that, I crank up a different version for our different VM for every SQL Server version just so that that way, I know that I don’t have any incompatibilities between versions because there are some patching problems like if you accidentally install a newer version, and then you want to go install the shared components from older versions.

Next question, “Hey, guys. I run …” Guys? There’s only one of me this week too.

“I run SQL Server in a VM environment with a NetApp back-end. We were on SnapMirror and FlexClone. I’m looking to layer Veeam on top of that for backup. What are your thoughts on that in terms of an approach?” Generally, when it comes to backups, I want the simplest, easiest thing possible because when I have to go troubleshooting that, I want to spend as little time as possible in order to get it out the door.

What I would ask is, “What’s the pain that you’re trying to solve? Why are you injecting so many third party pieces into there?” I love each of those pieces individually to solve specific problems, but if you’re just doing it for fun, maybe ease up and not add so many pieces in.

Next question, “I know that shrinking is bad, however, my storage team is cheap on space. Is there another option to reclaim unused space?”

The thing with the storage teams is they can’t shrink your Windows volume. Your Windows volume isn’t going to get smaller, so even if you shrink a database, it’s not like that’s really going to give it back to the storage team. Whatever your volume size is, that’s what it is. What I talk to the storage team about is “If we’re looking to shrink my volume, that means I go build new volumes and maybe log ship from one place to another database mirroring, all that. Exactly how much space are we talking about reclaiming, because usually, the manpower required in order to save 50 gigs of the space just isn’t worth it?”

Our recommendation on how to talk to a manager who wants to move 65 SQL Servers to use MySQL when the licensing is due, I don’t. I’m a huge fan of the TV show ‘Columbo’. This was a detective show with Peter Falk, and Columbo like to play really stupid. He would look like a disheveled mess. He had a wrinkled raincoat, and his hair look like a big mop, just all kinds of weird stuff going on, and when people would talk to him, they would think he was really stupid.

Then later in the show, in every 30-minute show, they would discover that the guy is actually a genius, but he would always, “Oh, I don’t know anything about that. Gosh. I don’t know. I’m just not that smart. I’m a regular old detective. My life makes all the decisions”.

When my manager comes to me and says, “We’d like to move 65 SQL Servers over into MySQL”, “Wow. That sounds really interesting. I don’t know anything about that, but I’d love to watch. If there’s anything you want me to take a look at, that’s totally cool”, so wham. I mean, I just step aside from that whole thing, and that’s the end of it.

If they ask me “Do I know anything about it?”, “No. I never worked with MySQL. If you want to send me to school, I’m totally down with that. Never seen that Linux thing. It’s kind of scary.”

Now, over in real life, what do I do with these things like Amazon’s DynamoDB? I use Amazon RDS. There’s all kinds of alternative platforms that I do find interesting, but when it comes to the company wanting to do something, if you want to do it, great. Go do it. Manual is over there.

Oh, man. Tough question. “What are all the security issues with cross-database chaining?” You hit one of those issues that it’s one of those where I have to go hit Books Online. Every single time, I want to go read this, but I’ll give you a book recommendation instead.

The book recommendation I want to give you is Denny Cherry’s ‘Securing SQL Server’. If you go to ‘Amazon.com’ or your favorite book seller, search for ‘Securing SQL Server’. I want to say it’s in the third edition now, and he goes into a minute detail on that. The thing I always say about this book is it’s easy when you hear “Oh my gosh. There’s a whole book on security. That must be incredibly boring”.

It’s not. It’s actually a good read. It’s enjoyable to read. Denny brings a security topic to life. Terry says, “Brent, you look lonely there all by yourself”.

The sad thing is is even when the webcast stops, I’ll be sitting here talking to myself. Me and the dog. This is just pretty much what my life is which is also why I do training videos. I have no problem staring into a camera and talking continuously. Another person says, “That’s the same when you talk about virtualization and not putting anything in the HOST layer”.

He says “That’s the same thing Allan Hirt does. Nothing goes on to his host OS. Now, my host OS is basically my web browser, slack, any kind of communication type queries or communication type applications, and that’s about it.” Columbo also says always … He always says “One more thing”.

Right at the end of the court trial, someone remembers, and I love … This is the show, so it has plus so many good [in a way]. Right at the end of the show, Columbo is, “Oh, and one more thing. Can you explain how …”, and then he solves the entire case and gets the person to admit that they were guilty of the murder.

Our next question, “What technology do you use for your personal virtual machines?”

Because I use a Mac and because I used to manage data centers or virtual machines, because I always did that with VMware out in the data center, I use VMware Fusion. It’s not that it’s any better than Parallels. I hear similar complaints about both VMware and Parallels. I just use VMware Fusion because I’m used to it. Then, I just think about VMware Fusion is it’s fast.

It has this thing called ‘Unity mode’ where I can make the background disappear and I can just Alt, Tab back and forth between management studio and between my native browser app type stuff and it just all seems like it’s running on one OS. It’s really slick. It’s also just in terms of a technical behind the scenes type thing. I have one of those Apple trash can Macs. Get this camera down on there. The little Mac that looks like a trash can. 64 Gigs of RAM.

I mean, you can get stunning amount of stuff in a desktop these days, and really inexpensive. Not bad. The Apple Mac is expensive, but the RAM is not so bad. Next one, “I explained to our team that we could stop worrying about syncing SIDs across environments if we just created the log ins and specify the same SID. They thought this would be difficult and would prefer to use change users’ log in. I said if it’s needed, database is for an availability groups. Who’s right?”

Generally, I like syncing log ins because I can’t predict who’s going to go make the log in. People will go do it when I’m not paying attention like there’s a third party app that will go create its own log ins. Installer programs, all kinds of stuff like that will go create their applications, so I just sync across the board. I don’t use this to change users’ log ins. I use Robert Davis’ script.

Robert Davis wrote the book on database mirroring. It literally is a book on database mirroring. If you search for Robert Davis sync log ins, he’s got a stored procedure that goes through and syncs log ins across servers, uses linked servers. Works great for database mirroring, log shipping, replication, and always on availability groups, et cetera. Nothing wrong with either of your answers.

I mean, I’m a fan of yours if we specified the SID if I can always do that. I just can’t always do that.

Next question, “My backup Windows are long because we are using a native SQL Server tools to do backups, and then we’re offloading these to tape with Backup Exec. Could I remove the native SQL Server backup and let Veeam and Backup Exec do the backups directly? What’s the best solution in your experience?”

The problem with some third party tools is that it can be sometimes the scheduling is taken out of the DBA team, and sometimes when that happens, the scheduling is done at times you wouldn’t expect. NetBackup or Backup Exec are great examples of that where sometimes when a backup team takes over, the backups of SQL Server are done in a queued fashion dependent on other server backups. I’ve gone into shops and they’ve said, “Oh my God. Our full backups are running at nine AM or some other horribly inconvenient time”, because they let the storage team or the backup team take over those backups. Generally, I see things as being the most successful when the DBAs manage that themselves and when they do the backups directly to disk, not to tape, because during an emergency, I need to be able to restore those as quickly as possible.

If you go grab our First Responder Kit, if you go to ‘Brentozar.com’ and fill in your email address down at the bottom, one of the things in our First Responder Kit is my HA and DR checklist that lets the business choose how much downtime and data loss they want. It also includes fees like pricing so that they understand how much it cost to get near a zero downtime. If the business tells me I have to be able to recover from an “Oops, delete” or from corruption within an hour, typically, I have to have those databases on disk, not heading off to a tape, jukebox, or a virtual tape library just because it takes too long. Next question, “What do you mean by Books Online? Can you give the URL?”

If you search ‘Stop laughing other attendees’, you had this question too when you were young. If you search for ‘SQL Server Books Online’, that’s where the documentation for SQL Server is, and on Microsoft, they actually publish all of the manuals online so search for ‘SQL Server Books Online’, and a whole world of exciting new reading awaits you. I used to make all kinds of fun of Books Online. It’s gotten so much better over the last five, six years, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with me making fun of them either. I mean, Microsoft has invested a lot in the documentation, and I really find Books Online pretty impressive these days for a lot of subjects.

Next one, “Do we get a free Brent Ozar mug for completing all of the virtual training classes that you offer? I’m dying for one, but my company won’t hire you.” It’s funny. The thing stopping us from sending out coffee mugs is taxes. Taxes and shipping is a giant pain in the rear.

If we started saying our virtual training classes come with a coffee mug, then there becomes this whole nightmare of tax logistics and customs for people who are overseas, so we’re just like “Screw it”. We don’t bother with it, which is also why we just give them away to clients.

Larry asks, “You mentioned a go-to book for replication several Office Hours episodes ago. What was it?” It’s out of date, but if you go to Amazon and search for ‘Replication’, there’s really only two.

One of them is really old by a guy named Hilary Cotter. The other one I want to say was written by Kendal Van Dyke, but if you go to Amazon and search for replication, it’s really easy to see or see well specifically SQL Server replication because there’s only two books, one of which is vaguely recent. Terry says “You should put a weather map up on your green screen background”. It’s actually really funny that I do that for recorded videos, but I do it in post-production. Not weather maps, but other stuff obviously.

Doing it live burns so much CPU on the computer. It causes just a video to slow down and all that, but I stopped doing that. I try every now and than because there’s third party tools available. They will do it faster and faster, so once they get to a good enough software where they can do it fast, I’ve always wanted to say “Coming to you live from inside your database”. Let’s see here.

Next up, someone says “Can I buy a mug now because the shipping is just such a pain in the rear?” We thought about doing it through Cafepress or Zazzle. There’s a few companies which is actually where we get the mugs from, but sometimes the quality issues are a little wonky like they print the logo a little sideways or too high up or down, and then we have to go wrestle with them with that.

Someone says, “TechNet is also Books Online. For the unfamiliar, that made me feel silly when I finally put two and two together on that one.”

It’s actually not, so there are a little articles over on TechNet that are not considered part of Books Online. Books Online really is just a product documentation and there’s additional extra stuff over on TechNet. Sometimes I’m a little less happy with TechNet there. Fellow human says, “Redgate also has a replication book”. That’s a great point.

If you go to ‘Redgate’ or if you search on Google or Bing or whatever, search for ‘Redgate community books’ or ‘Redgate books’. Redgate is one of the software vendors that I talked about earlier. They have a book catalog. One of the things that can be a little deceiving with their book catalog, it has tabs on it. You got to click on the DBA tab at least the last time I was over there. When you click on that, most of their books are available completely free.

You do have to give your email address and name, and social security number and blood type. Totally not true. You don’t have to give your blood type, but then, you get the PDF immediately so you can go start reading it, and they have a really good editorial team so I’m sure the book on … I haven’t read that book on replication, but I’m sure it’s good. All right.

Then, the last question we’ll take is “Will you post a schematic for 3D printing the mug?”

Sorry, I shouldn’t be adding to this mug distraction. Although, a thing that I would always want to do with 3D printers is I would love to have a bubble head instructions that we could print up so that people could have our bubble heads on their desk. Yes, we actually had bubble heads at one point, so that would be a little fun thing that I’d love to do. All right. Thanks, everybody for hanging out with me during this Office Hours.

We will see you next week. We’re actually coming to you from PASS. We’re going to see how the bandwidth does on that. Now, the whole team is going to be in Seattle for the PASS summit, and so if any if you guys will be there, we will see you there. Adios.