Whew - the Microsoft folks really came through on this one and tracked down the problem pretty quickly. I want to personally thank Denis Churin, Nikita Shamgunov and Sundaram Narayanan for their detailed investigation into the issue and helping us get it fixed. I'm going to explain the issue to help anybody else get through…
This week I presented at the SSWUG Virtual Conference on how to benchmark your storage performance with Microsoft's SQLIO utility. Last week I talked about running SQL Server in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Take those two things together, and we've got storage benchmarking on Amazon EC2 servers:
Maximum write speed: 68 MBs/sec
Maximum read speed: 8 MBs/sec
I think Tim Ford aka SQLAgentMan was the first with this, but now it's turned into a monster. On Twitter, we're trading SQL putdowns. You can find 'em on search.twitter.com by searching for #SQLputdowns.
Here were my personal favorites from the chatter:
This month's Redmond Mag glows about some new features in SQL 2008, and yes, it does have a lot of cool tricks up its sleeve. But before you go upgrading your servers to get those new features, there's one thing you need to know. New versions of SQL Server are not always faster for every…
Sometimes you need an offsite database server in case something goes wrong, but you can't afford a full-blown disaster recovery datacenter. Or maybe you've got some ideas that you'd like to try out with a big SQL Server 2005 box, but you don't have the hardware sitting around idle. Or maybe you'd just like to…
I've mentioned Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com a few times over the years here, and it bears repeating: he writes a great blog for developers, and DBAs need to read it too. I also follow him on Twitter, and a couple of weeks ago he mentioned he was having problems deciphering execution plans: Holy cow -…
I bought a Microsoft Zune 8 to test the new SQLServerPedia video podcasts and the user experience was so unpolished, so unprofessional that I just had to bang out a blog about it. Looking at the iPod Nano next to the Zune 8, I could never understand why somebody would buy the Zune 8. Now having used both of them, it makes even less sense.
Stephen Wynkoop blogged about social networking as a part of the hiring process. I'll sum it up in a line: like it or not, you are being Googled when you submit your resume. Get over it.
Would you buy a car without searching for an online review? Sure, some people do - otherwise the dismal Chrysler Sebring would never sell a copy. If you haven't read Jeremy Clarkson's review of the Chrysler Sebring, go do it, because it'll brighten your day with gems like this:
Dear Coworker,
Hi. I work differently than other people you may have worked with. I wanna take a minute to bring you up to speed on how I do it, and what this might mean for you.
Robert X. Cringely is a columnist for PBS - you know, the worldwide authority on hot information technology issues. You might recognize some of their other experts like Norm Abrams and Big Bird. Cringely's just like them, only with less name recognition.
In his latest blog, Cringely explains how cloud computing is going to make databases disappear altogether. Cloud services are going to be so fast that traditional things like SQL Server and Oracle won't matter anymore.
Database administrators: are you backing up your SQL Servers to local drives? If so, you need to stop for a minute to think about a few possible side effects, and maybe think about backing up to a network share instead. Why? I'm glad you asked!
Get your data off the server faster
Storage is a black box, right? The SAN admins ask how much storage space you need, you tell them, and then they give it to you. They don't tell you how fast (or slow) it is, they don't know whether it meets your needs, and they probably don't know where the bottlenecks are. It's time…
Jason Massie and Brent Ozar work with SQL Server for a living and write blogs for fun, but that’s where the similarities end. Jason’s a fan of shared storage SANs: putting SQL Server data and logs on the same set of physical hard drives. Brent’s a cheerleader for dedicated configurations where the arrays are separated…
Got more than one DBA? Want to make your life easier? You might want to configure a Central Management Server.
This is useful for fast-changing shops where there's a lot of servers added and removed. At my last company, we had a hard enough time telling everybody when we'd finished adding a new server, or what the new server's name was, or when we didn't need to look at a server anymore.
A reader wrote in and asked: We're running SQL Server with blades and a NetApp SAN. We have a few hundred databases from 100mb to 200gb. All data, logs, tempdb, etc. are located in the same 30-disk pool. Apparently this was setup using NetApp's guidelines. NetApp recommendations are to put everything in one aggregate, or…
Say we have a physical database server sitting over there in the rack. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend it's a slightly older model, a HP DL380 G2 with a couple of P3 CPUs, 4gb of ram, and six local 36gb drives. The storage is broken up into a mirrored pair of drives for…
Here's my favorite SQL Server books for 2016-2014:
T-SQL Fundamentals - (updated for SQL 2016) - don't be fooled by this "fundamentals" title, because everybody who writes T-SQL queries needs this book. It's the manual we should have been given when we started, and everyone's going to learn something about concurrency, performance, and updates here.
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has been released, and the release date was Wednesday, August 6. Awesome - less than three years since SQL 2005, thereby meeting their goals and keeping the whole Software Assurance benefits worth the money.
You can download it now if you've got an MSDN subscription - those are a great deal at around $300 per year.
Jason Massie (aka StatisticsIO.com) wrote a blog post this week called The Death of the DBA. He talks about why the coming cloud computing craze creates career chaos. I have the exact opposite opinion: I can't wait for databases to move toward the cloud because it makes database administrators even more vital. Reason #1: Cloud…
OdinJobs.com interviewed eight different DBAs from completely different backgrounds and careers. The one thing we've got in common is that we blog, but outside of that, we've got wildly different points of view about the career and what we like about SQL Server.
I shall now copy/paste Jason Massie's hard work at listing each person's blog URL and feed, because I have no shame:
