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Clients and Case Studies

Why this? Why now? Why me?

10 Signs It Was Time to Hire Me

Last Updated February 17, 2026

Clients and Case Studies

You’ve been reading my blog, watching my videos, and maybe even taking some of my training classes. You’ve heard me say things like “my clients” from time to time, and you’re wondering… why do companies actually hire me? What problem are they trying to solve? Well, when clients meet with me for the first time,…

That's a pair of baby potbelly pigs, sleeping atop each other on my lap, because they were inseparable.

Helping Software Vendors Talk to DBAs

Last Updated August 7, 2025

ISV and SaaS Database Design

Software vendors have a wide variety of clients: Some clients don’t have any IT staff at all, and just outsource everything. The client wants to hand an installation manual to their contractor and say, “Build whatever the software vendor wants.” Some clients have a full time sysadmin or two, and those sysadmins don’t really know…

Updated, Larger Stack Overflow Demo Database

Last Updated July 16, 2024

Stack Overflow publishes a data dump with all user-contributed content, and it’s a fun set of data to use for demos. I took the 2024-April data dump, and imported it into a Microsoft SQL Server database. It’s an 31GB torrent (magnet) that expands to a ~202GB database. I used Microsoft SQL Server 2016, so you…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2022-06)

Last Updated August 12, 2022

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, shares a version of their data in XML format from time to time, and then I import it into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data distributions, lots of different data types, easy to…

PollGab hosting bill, page 1

Building PollGab.com: February’s Hosting Bill: $1.85.

Last Updated March 3, 2022

Earlier this week, I wrote about how we designed the database for PollGab.com. Because we went with AWS DynamoDB for the database storage and AWS Lambda for the processing work, costs are really, really low: That is not a typo: that’s $1.85 USD. Richie puts the business logic in functions, and those functions run in AWS…

Building PollGab.com: Designing the Data Model

Last Updated March 1, 2022

In the last post, I talked about how Richie and I sketched out the goals of PollGab.com, the site where you can post questions for other folks to answer during their live streams. I challenged you to decide: What data needs to be stored to make all this work? What database or persistence layer should…

Building PollGab.com: Design a Database for Live Session Questions

Last Updated March 1, 2022

Years ago when we did online presentations or live Office Hours webcasts, attendees would type their questions into the “Questions” section of whatever webcast platform we were using – WebEx, GoToWebinar, Zoom. This sucked because: People would put questions all over the place (Questions, Chat, email, etc) It was hard to keep track of which…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2021-06)

Last Updated June 17, 2021

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, publicly exports their data every couple/few months. @TarynPivots (their DBA) tweets about it, and then I pull some levers and import the XML data dump into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2021-02)

Last Updated June 17, 2021

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, publicly exports their data every couple/few months. @TarynPivots (their DBA) tweets about it, and then I pull some levers and import the XML data dump into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data…

Updated Stack Overflow Public Data Set for June 2019

Last Updated June 6, 2019

The place that saves your job Taryn and the kind folks at Stack Overflow have updated their public XML data dump for June, so I’ve imported that into an updated sample database for your blogging and presenting satisfaction. You can download the 40GB torrent (magnet) and it expands to a ~350GB SQL Server 2008 database. Because…

A Presenter’s Guide to the Stack Overflow Database

Last Updated August 8, 2018

The place that saves your job You present on SQL Server topics at user groups and conferences, and you’ve been wondering how to get started with the Stack Overflow public database. Here’s a quick list of things to know. For stable demos, use StackOverflow2010. This smaller 10GB database has data from the first years of…

New Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2018-06)

Last Updated November 26, 2020

@Taryn 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 38GB torrent (magnet), which gives you a series of 7Zip files…

sp_BlitzIndex @Mode = 2

Creating Basic Indexes on the Stack Overflow Public Database

Last Updated September 3, 2017

Indexing, Stack Overflow

My public SQL Server database copy of the Stack Overflow data dump only includes clustered indexes by default. I want to keep your database size as small as possible for quick downloading. But like any database – when you create it, should you add your own indexes to make queries go faster? The answer lies…

sp_AllNightLog: Creating Jobs Like I’m The President

Last Updated August 11, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Log Shipping, SQL Server

Look, we need these things The setup for sp_AllNightLog creates jobs for four separate activities 1 job to poll for new databases to back up (primary) 1 job to poll for new databases to restore (secondary) 10 jobs to poll for backups to take (primary) 10 jobs to poll for restores to… whatever (secondary) And,…

sp_AllNightLog: Poll Vaulting

Last Updated July 12, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Log Shipping, SQL Server

Carry on It turns out that the only thing harder than checking for new databases restored to a SQL Server, is checking a folder for a backup of a database that doesn’t exist on another SQL Server. These are both part of what sp_AllNightLog has to do. The other components, which use workers and a…

sp_AllNightLog: ¿Por que los queues?

Last Updated July 7, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Ola Hallengren’s Database Maintenance Scripts

Building stuff I sometimes really hate coming up with ideas, and much prefer someone to just say “I want this” so I can go out into the world and figure out how to do that. Occasionally though, I realize that I’m not going to get all that much direction. That’s what happened with sp_BlitzQueryStore. It…

New Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2017-06)

Last Updated July 6, 2017

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…

Erik Darling blogs kCura Relativity

Introducing sp_AllNightLog: Log Shipping at Scale, Open Source

Last Updated June 30, 2017

Backup and Recovery, First Responder Kit, kCura Relativity

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…

Brent Ozar reading

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 3: What the Ideal Engineering Team Looks Like

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Architecture, kCura Relativity, Microsoft Azure

Background: I’m working with kCura to build a Faux PaaS: something akin to Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB, but internally managed. You can catch up with what we’ve discussed so far in Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. In the last post, I talked about measuring backup and restore throughputs across different instance types, regions, storage configs, and backup locations.…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 1: The SQL Server DevOps Scene in 2017

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Architecture, kCura Relativity

In the cloud, treat your servers like cattle, not like pets. Rounding up a herd of servers in Texas In the cloud, systems administration is very different than the on-premises stuff you’re used to. When you build VMs in the cloud with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS, meaning AWS EC2, GCE, or Azure VMs), you expect them to…