Humor

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During this month’s Senior DBA Class in Chicago, I started joking with the attendees about what songs they should play during common DBA job tasks, like: Best Song to Play During a Server Outage Best Song to Illustrate Your Predecessor’s Skills Best Song to Accompany an Index Rebuild Best Song to Play When Examining a Slow Query Best…

Trace Flag 2330: Who needs missing index requests?

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Erik Darling

Bad Idea Jeans, Indexing, SQL Server

Hey, remember 2005? What a great year for… not SQL Server. Mirroring was still a Service Pack away, and there was an issue with spinlock contention on OPT_IDX_STATS or SPL_OPT_IDX_STATS. The KB for it is over here, and it’s pretty explicit that the issue was fixed in 2008, and didn’t carry over to any later…

Brent’s Bad Idea Jeans: Stop People From Changing Tables with This One Trick

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

Developers hate his bad idea jeans: Transact-SQL CREATE VIEW dbo.StopThemDead WITH SCHEMABINDING AS SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table1 UNION ALL SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table2 UNION ALL.... 123456 CREATE VIEW dbo.StopThemDead WITH SCHEMABINDINGASSELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table1UNION ALLSELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Table2UNION ALL.... Presto, the schemabinding option means no one can change the underlying tables. (At least, until they…

The Nine Circles of Developer Hell

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Commit message: Duck! Everyone’s code is terrible. But exactly how terrible is yours? First Circle: Code Limbo We can’t say this is good code, but for the most part nobody notices it. Second Circle: Code Lust Cool function, bro! Third Circle: Gluttonous Code There’s always one simple piece of logic that’s been written hundreds of…

Contest: Write the Scariest DBA Sentence (10 words or less)

Last Updated February 12, 2017

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Warm up your keyboard, it’s time for a contest. The challenge: Write the creepiest sentence you can come up with. You get 10 words max. An example to get you started: Oh, I’m sure someone set up the backups. The rules: Enter as often as you like (here on the blog, in the comments for…

Defragmentation Proven to Completely Fix Performance Issues

Last Updated February 13, 2017

SPRINGFIELD – Local systems administrator Jackie Toole was carried through city streets today on the backs of ecstatic Acme Tooling employees. For months, Acme’s accounting department had complained of slow performance in their payroll application. “Saving a new hire took minutes, and we had no idea what was going on. Jackie did something, and next thing…

Overheard in Performance Tuning Training Class

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Doug Lane

Humor, SQL Server

A sampling of things overheard at our 2015 Performance Troubleshooting Class in Denver: “I’m not a GUID hater.” “Oh, God help me. I’ve clicked on XML.” “Reporting Services looks around at the available memory, makes itself at home, maybe takes its pants off.” “Where would I go to check if I — hypothetically — accidentally set…

The Most Confusing Words, Phrases, and Acronyms in SQL Server

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Words are hard. Acronyms are even harder. Here’s the words that give me the most trouble when talking to people about SQL Server. And thanks to all my Twitter friends quoted here for their suggestions! Replication “I have a question about replication…” “Which kind? Transactional? Merge? Peer to Peer?” “Availability Groups.” Technically, the word “replication”…

Brent’s Bad Idea Jeans [Video]

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, SQL Server

Over the years, I’ve come up with some rather “interesting” answers to SQL Server problems including: Warming up SQL Server’s buffer pool by selecting all the data from all the tables Creating indexes with triggers Adding nonclustered indexes to clustered columnstore indexes Compressing backups the hard way Putting databases on a RAM drive In this 20-minute…

Using Triggers to Automatically Add Indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Indexing, SQL Server

Let’s say you’ve got a vendor application that creates tables, loads them, queries them, and drops them all the time. You can’t change the code. The tables involved desperately need an index in order to go faster, and they’re your biggest performance bottleneck. Enter DDL triggers. Regular DML triggers fire when you insert/update/delete rows in a…

How to Add Nonclustered Indexes to Clustered Columnstore Indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Bad Idea Jeans, Columnstore Indexes, Indexing, SQL Server

SQL Server 2012 introduced nonclustered columnstore indexes, but I never saw them used in the wild simply because once created, they made the underlying table read-only. Not a lot of folks like read-only tables. (Bad news, by the way – that limitation hasn’t disappeared in 2014.) SQL Server 2014 brings clustered columnstore indexes, and they’re…

Top Classic Country Songs for SQL Server DBAs

Last Updated February 13, 2017

“I Shot a Server in Reno (just to watch it die)” Johnny Cash “AlwaysOn on My Mind” Willie Nelson “WASD, Don’t Take Your Single Thread to Town” Kenny Rogers “Transactions in the (Replication) Stream” Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton “Stand by Your Maintenance Plan” Tammy Wynette “Ring Buffer of Fire” Johnny Cash “Your Deadlockin’ Heart”…

Bob Dylan Explains TempDB (Video)

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Humor, TempDB, Videos

How many files must a TempDB have before it’s allowed to be fast? How many table variables must a server walk down before it’s considered a table? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, and Bob Dylan will share it with you in this 25-minute video – hopefully you can understand him.

Learn to Speak DBA Slang

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Ever wonder what those big-company DBAs are saying when they start busting out the cryptic terms? Learn the slang of database administrators with this handy reference guide. Wizard of Oz – admin who makes everyone think things are automated, but he’s really just duct taping things together. “The executives think we’ve got a reporting dashboard,…

Troubleshooting the Top Five Waits Occurring in SQL Server DBAs

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Humor, SQL Server

We’ve all been there: the SQL Server Database Administrator has been running slowly and everyone’s getting cranky. How can you tell what’s wrong and what steps you need to take to restore normal operations? Database administrators have great instrumentation. When asked, they’re happy to tell you about their bottlenecks in excruciating detail. Use this handy…

“Who Wrote This?” Contest

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Over and over, readers leave comments here saying things like “Nice comment, Brent” on a post that Kendra wrote. We laugh about it – after all, they can’t really be reading that closely if they don’t even notice the name on the bottom of the post, right above where they’re commenting – but we started…

SQL Server App Store Reviews

Last Updated September 22, 2019

If SQL Server cost $4.99 in the App Store, what would the reviews look like? Not as good as the Access app – ** By B. Analyst, December 6, 2011 I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. The GUI in this app sucks. It’s hard to build reports, and it’s overpriced. $4.99?!? Save…

“What Were We Thinking?” Enter the Brent Ozar PLF Photo Contest

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Before we set sail on SQLCruise Alaska our good friend Crys Manson ( b | t ) captured a few moments of Brent Ozar PLF together in action in Seattle. It was a normal enough afternoon for the team– there was a lot of jumping, some surfing on traffic cones, and we almost crashed a…

Pimp My MCM Certificate Contest Winner

Last Updated February 12, 2017