Imagine this: you have a database, and it’s on a SQL Server instance, which is on a server. That server may be physical or it may be virtualized. The database, or the instance, or the server, has a high availability solution implemented. It might be failover clustering; it might be synchronous mirroring; it might be VMware HA.
Do you want to make your database server faster?
If you answered no, you can go back to manually checking that all of last night’s backups succeeded.
Imagine you work for a zoo, and you need to ship an animal to another zoo. If you are told one will be a mouse and one will be an elephant, you will need to handle them differently. Elephants get moved by truck, while mice can be put in a box and driven or flown.
Taking care of your health is incredibly important (says the marathon runner). Eating right, exercising, and getting plenty of rest help you stay healthy and perform optimally. Your database server’s health is important to your company’s health. You need to take regular backups, check for consistency, and keep indexes tuned for optimal performance. Here are…
No one knows everything, especially about SQL Server. When you encounter a problem, especially for the first time, you may not know how to solve it. I’ve seen some crazy approaches taken to fix problems – like duct tape on a car. Many times, instead of fixing the root cause of a problem, such as a poorly-performing query, a server-level change is made.
I've been working with and talking about SQL Server Log Shipping a lot lately!
I've gotten a lot of great questions about log shipping, so I've put together an FAQ.
In order to improve your applications and your databases, they will need to change over time. The structure of the database changes, the structure of the tables change, the data in the tables change, the application changes, the queries against the data change. Indexes that once helped performance now just bloat your database and cause extra work for inserts, updates, and deletes.
They are elusive and hard to spot in the wild, but they exist: rare index options that can enhance the performance of your queries. If you have a solid knowledge of index basics and want to add to your collection, this is the session for you! In this 30-minute video, Jes will show you how filtered indexes, compressed indexes, and indexed views work and can improve performance.
Some parts of our jobs are not glamorous, but necessary. For example, I have to brush Brent’s Bob Dylan wig weekly, to make sure it’s shiny and perfect. Documentation is a task many people roll their eyes at, procrastinate about starting, have a hard time keeping up-to-date, and in general avoid.
Stop avoiding it, and embrace the benefits!
I’m curious. I like to know how things work. I have to read the user manual of everything I buy so I know all of its features. I like clicking all the buttons in applications I work with. However, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has so many I haven’t gotten through all of them. At SQL Saturday #118 Wisconsin earlier this year, I was watching a presentation and the presenter clicked “Include Client Statistics”.
At PASS Summit last week, I presented “The What, Why, And How of Filegroups” to a packed room. It was great to see so many people eager to learn about something that is fundamental to every SQL Server database, but often not understood well enough. As always, during and after the session, there were a…
I have been in love with books and libraries most of my life.
I remember some of my earliest favorites: Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, Bridge to Terebithia, The Chronicles of Narnia. I remember feeling grown up when my sixth grade teacher handed me Gone With the Wind.
I recently posed the question, “Who’s taking your backups?” This is of utmost importance, because your business’s data is the business. Protecting it and backing it up need to be priorities for DBAs.
Now, for my next question: who is responsible for restoring those backups?
Let’s have a chat about your indexes in SQL Server. Indexes can be confusing. They are the easiest way to boost performance of queries, but there are so many options and terms around indexes that it can be hard to keep track of them. Let’s chat about the differences between clustered and nonclustered indexes, key…
Here at Brent Ozar Unlimited®, we offer a server performance checkup to clients. As the newest member of the team, I wasn’t sure what to expect when running one. I found out that it’s pretty cool. I pretend we're Special Forces operatives, strapped into our parachutes, doing a HALO opening over client servers. (This homemade parachute…
