Posts by Jeremiah Peschka

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 It’s a regular Tuesday afternoon. Users are happily submitting orders into the shopping cart. After browsing around the website for a while,…

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…

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? Cache Hit Ratio You’re tracking your SQL Server’s cache hit ratio. That number is consistently 97-99%, surely that means you don’t need…

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…

Celebrity cooking shows are popular around Brent Ozar Unlimited®. We watch Top Chef for the creative cooking as much as the human drama. Contestants on Top Chef face huge challenges – they’re working alone, have a limited set of tools, have a fixed set of ingredients, and operate under ridiculously strict time guidelines. What makes…

There are many ways to scale out your database; many of these techniques require advanced management and expensive add-ons or editions. Database sharding is a flexible way of scaling out a database. In this presentation, Jeremiah Peschka explains how to scale out using database sharding, covers basic techniques, and shares some of the pitfalls. This…

Without looking in your wallet, do you know how much cash you have? Most of us know within a few dollars. Now, without looking in your SQL Server, do you know much data is cached in memory? You probably don’t and that’s okay; you shouldn’t know how much data SQL Server is caching in memory.…

Aggregate functions are convenient – they solve a business need and they make development easy. Unfortunately, not all business requirements are so easy to solve. Let’s look at one example: rolling averages. The Rolling Average A rolling average is a simple concept; an average is computed over a fixed subset of data. Rolling average calculations…

Your company is considering a data warehouse and you’re unsure where to start; with so many tools on the market, it can be difficult to pick a solution. Jeremiah Peschka has designed and deployed several data warehouses using Hive to scale flexibly with data volume and query complexity. Learn what Jeremiah has found in real-life…