Analyzing a workload can be difficult. There are a number of tools on the market (both free and commercial). These tools universally reduce workload analysis to totals and averages - details and outliers are smeared together. I’m against using just averages to analyze workloads; averages and totals aren’t good enough, especially with the tools we…
With the release of SQL Server 2014, we get to learn all kinds of new licensing changes. While I don’t work for Microsoft legal, I do have a PDF reader and a web browser. You can follow along in the SQL Server 2014 Licensing Datasheet… if you dare.Server + CAL Licensing is Still AroundIt’s only for…
It’s easy to find problem queries on your SQL Server after they’ve happened. You can open your favorite monitoring tool or look in the plan cache. Those options are great for finding things after they’ve happened, but what if you want to find problems as they happen?
Server Side Trace
You could set up a SQL Server Server Side Trace. This is an acceptable solution if you’re using SQL Server 2008 or earlier. There are a few problems with this approach.
A lot of folks would have you think that Extended Events need to be complicated and involve copious amounts of XML shredding and throwing things across the office. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be so bad. Collecting Blocked Process Reports and Deadlocks Using Extended Events When you want to find…
Table valued parameters (TVPs) are nothing new - they were introduced in SQL Server 2008. TVPs are a great way to get data into SQL Server, and yet very few developers use them. Getting Started with TVPs In order to get started, we need to create a user defined type. This type is necessary so…
Everyone wants reports but nobody wants to build out a separate reporting server. What options do you have short of throwing up your hands in defeat? Join Jeremiah to learn about four SQL Server technologies that help with reporting in production. This session is for DBAs and developers looking for a place to get started with reporting against SQL Server.
The plan cache holds a lot of secrets about what’s going on inside SQL Server. In the First Responder Kit we shared one of our plan cache scripts to find the top resource consuming queries. That query works well, but over time we’ve added some additional functionality to the query. I figured it was time to share the new query that we’re using to analyze SQL Server performance.
While working on some DMV scripts, I came up with a lazy way to have a user definable sort order in the query that seemed like pure genius. I showed it to the team and they’d never seen anything like it before. The Situation Users like to be in control. They want to define custom…
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
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…
The best way to improve your skills as a database professional is to practice. If you’re like me, you might even take that practice outside of the workplace and do a bit of homework on the side. You can’t take a copy of your production database home with you, so what can you do? Thankfully, the fine people Microsoft have put together a set of databases that you can download and play with.
I’ve been told that an attendee at the PASS Summit pre-conference event asked about using dynamic SQL to get around some of the problems with filtered indexes. I’m not entirely sure what the question was, but it did give me the opportunity to play around with filtered indexes and write some simple demo code to illustrate just the kind of shenanigans that you can get up to.
In the 1950s, the global economy saw a tremendous change - container ships revolutionized global commerce. Shipping costs got 36 times cheaper with the introduction of containerization. What if you could reduce operational costs and revolutionize application and database deployment in the same way? Containers to the Future In the last few months, the developer world…
We work with SQL Server every day, happily sending and receiving millions of packets of data across the network. Have you stopped to think about what happens when something goes wrong?
The Situation
Storage vendors brag about the IOPS that their hardware can provide. Cloud providers have offered guaranteed IOPS for a while now. It seems that no matter where we turn, we can't get away from IOPS.What Are You Measuring?When someone says IOPS, what are they referring to? IOPS is an acronym for Input/Output Operations Per Second.…
SQL Server ships with sane defaults, right? Well, sort of. SQL Server ships with pretty sane defaults for a single CPU socket server or for a development work station. Honestly, the defaults are good enough for many things, but there are a few gotchas. Changing these settings is quick, relatively painless, and can result in all around stability and happiness.
Business is booming; the sales team is bringing in more business and the software developers are successfully scaling out at the web server tier. There are signs of pressure on the database tier and you realize that it's time to scale out. You're using SQL Server 2012, you need to improve performance, and the first thought that comes to mind is the new hotness: SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups.
As businesses grow, many teams start considering scale out database solutions but they're cautious - they want to know how to keep data up to date in multiple places. In theory, you can use log shipping, mirroring, or AlwaysOn Availability groups. While this answers the literal question, what people really mean is usually very different.…
Did you know that you can ship a bobcat 1/30th of the time and still maintain 97% positive feedback on ebay?
What other statistical lies are lurking out there for you to find?
Moving between databases is hard enough, try using multiple databases in the same application and you might start thinking you've gone insane. Different application demands for accessibility, redundancy, backwards compatibility, or interoperability make this a possibility in the modern data center. One of the biggest challenges of running a heterogeneous database environment is dealing with a world of data type differences. There are two main ways to work through this situation:
