Right now, Erik and I are presenting at the 24 Hours of PASS. We’re talking about Last Season’s Performance Tuning Techniques. You can register and join us now. Wanna play along with us as we show how your performance skills might be a little out of date? Here’s the demos and the slides: Last Season's…
SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 brought us performance tuners all kinds of shiny goodies – like the ability to see wait stats inside a query’s actual execution plan. I was really excited when this first came out, but I keep seeing some real oddities. Let’s keep this one really simple: I’m using the Stack…
Eagle-eyed @NikoNeugebauer (who you should definitely be following on Twitter) noticed something interesting in one of Lenovo’s recent TPC-H benchmark results. In the #TPCH document, the availability of the system with #SQLServer 2017 is listed for 19th of October 2017 🙂https://t.co/Y3VNQt9buZ — Niko Neugebauer (@NikoNeugebauer) July 18, 2017 The benchmark PDF shows: Now this isn’t necessarily accurate…
I’ve been using the Stack Overflow public database for my performance tuning demos for a few years now, and I just keep finding more reasons to love it. It’s got a few simple tables with a lot of data. The main ones are Users, Posts (questions & answers), Comments, Votes, and Badges, ranging from 1GB…
Remember that very first day when you officially became a Database Administrator? Remember how the Senior DBA sat you down and gave you clear, specific instructions on how to handle SQL Server? No? You don’t remember that? That’s because it rarely happens. You just happened to be the one standing closest to the database server…
One of my most popular sessions is Watch Brent Tune Queries. I’ve updated it every year, tuning different queries, showing new tools like SentryOne’s Plan Explorer, StatisticsParser.com, SSMS’s plan comparison, and SSMS 2017’s new scenario evaluation tool. One hour is never enough – there’s so many tricks and tips I want to show in action,…
On my Poland trip, I sat down with Kamil Nowinski and Damian Widera to talk about how I got started with presenting, why I don’t use PowerShell (but you should), how sp_Blitz ended up on Github, my work/life balance, the Microsoft Certified Master exam, and a lot more. The whole thing is fully transcribed, so…
Nick Craver and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump, which I then take and import into SQL Server for teaching performance tuning. You can download the 16GB torrent (magnet), which gives you a series of 7Zip…
In our Faux PaaS project, we need a backup plan – or rather, a restore plan. On each SQL Server instance, clients can create as many databases as they want, anytime they want, with no human intervention. We need those databases covered by disaster recovery as quickly as practical. SQL Server’s newer disaster recovery options – Always On Availability Groups and…
SQL Server Integration Services has changed a lot over the last decade, but one thing has remained the same: Andy Leonard has been the go-to name in the business. I’m excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Andy for online delivery of his master-level course, Expert SSIS Training. Here’s the abstract: Data integration is the…
The old advice went something like this: “Put your data and log files on separate drives and your server will be more reliable. If you lose the data drive, you can still do a tail-of-the-log backup, and you won’t lose any data.” It’s advice. But is it actually good advice? Let’s think through it. If…
I’m excited to announce that Erik and I are presenting the opening session at this year’s free online 24 Hours of PASS webcasts! Here’s our session: Last Season’s Performance Tuning Techniques You’re kinda-sorta comfortable doing performance tuning on SQL Server. You’ve read a few blogs, you monitor Page Life Expectancy, you rebuild your indexes, and…
We’re trying something new at the company: Builder Day. We define a slightly-out-of-the-norm task, and then the team splits up and tackles the task on different cloud platforms, writing it up as we go. These posts aren’t going to make you an expert on the topic – they’re just meant to let you skim through…
Going to the PASS Summit in Seattle this year? Join me & Erik Darling on Tuesday, the day before the conference, at our pre-con session, Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017. Your job is making SQL Server go faster, but you haven’t been to a performance tuning class since 2016 came out….
Now that SQL Server ships with R, and you can use R code in T-SQL, your managers might be asking, “Hey, can you start doing some analysis and visualization?” Good news! We’ve got a new class for that. Come learn the fundamentals of analysis & machine learning in R, and how to operationalize your work….
Availability Groups are all the rage right now, especially since they’re included with SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition. Our Availability Groups blog post category is one of the most popular on the site, and in my 4-day Senior DBA class, people have always been asking for more in-depth coverage of clustering and AGs. Let’s get together for a…
For some of you, the headline is self-explanatory, and you just want the URL, so here it is: https://github.com/olahallengren/sql-server-maintenance-solution For the rest of you, here’s what it means. What are Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts? Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts are a widely used replacement for maintenance plans. His backup, integrity check, and index optimization stored procedures are…
Every now and then, clients ask me to interview candidates for their open DBA positions. I get to see a lot of resumes, and there are a few warning signs that pop up regularly. 1. The Keyword Encyclopedia. I get it: you’ve opened SSMS before, and you clicked on all the options and wizards, and…
SQL Server has three ways to get execution plans from the plan cache: sys.dm_exec_query_plan – around since SQL Server 2005 sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan – added in 2005 SP2 sys.query_store_plan – new in SQL Server 2016 And there’s an important problem with the first one. To show it, let’s take one of my many bad ideas, building queries that take 12+…
If one of your SQL Servers went down at some point over the last week: What’s the most data you could have lost? What’s the longest you would have been down for? To find out, Erik and I (mostly Erik) wrote sp_BlitzBackups (sure, blame me for everything. –ED). Download the latest First Responder Kit including the…
