Processes and Practices

I’m not talking about “oops” mistakes. I’m talking about things you decided to do on purpose, and then deeply regretted later. Me personally, my biggest database regret was that time almost twenty years ago when I ran a Profiler trace from my desktop computer. My very slow desktop computer. Which was connected to production over…

Managing what requests are made Managing the efficiency of each request Managing the hardware capacity available to satisfy requests And that’s it. In the grand scheme of things, those are the only 3 knobs you get. Oh sure, from the outside, performance tuning looks more complicated than that, but at the end of the day,…

What’s the first thing you remember struggling with on SQL Server? Your first memory of, “Dang, I just can’t figure this out,” and then you had a Eureka moment later when it was so much more clear?” I asked folks on Twitter, and the answers were great, so I had to round ’em up here…

It’s not just you: it’s hard for all of us to figure out where to go when we find a bug or want to add a feature. Here’s a quick rundown: Azure Data Studio – open an issue in the Github repo. While you open an issue, Github helps by searching the existing issues as you’re…

All of these are doable with scripts, tools, and/or elbow grease, mind you – they’re just not as easy as they sound at first glance until you know about the existence of those scripts, tools, and/or free people waiting around with spare elbow grease. “Go through the log and find out who ran this query.” “Apps sometimes…

Here are the 2018 blog posts you visited the most: 10. What’s New in SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.1: Faster Functions – We’re excited about a lot of stuff in 2019, but this is by far and away the winner. 9. How to Check Performance on a New SQL Server – Start with the easy…

If you like learning random tips & tricks, there’s a great discussion going on in Reddit: What are your game-changing discoveries in SQL? I’m only going to give away the first one just to get you started: if you need to repeatedly comment and un-comment groups of code, do this: Transact-SQL -- /* First line.…

Every now and then, you’re going to need to run a query that takes a long time. You’re going to want to make sure that it succeeds and that you can see the full output – even if your workstation disconnects – or maybe you want to check the status from home later. You’re going…

1. Are backups and CHECKDB being done? Before I step out on the wire, I want to know if there’s a safety net. If there’s a recoverability risk, I don’t stop here – I keep looking because the rest of the answers affect the safety net we’re going to put in place. “10TB of data…

Pumpkin Spice When I’m looking at someone’s server, it’s easy to tell the kind of care it’s been under. We’ve written a lot about servers that have gotten the wrong kind of care. You know, no backups, no checkdb, but someone managed to turn auto create stats off for every database, and enable affinity masking.…

In the course of your career, you’re going to accumulate a folder of scripts to do various tasks. There’s one really, really important lesson you need to learn as early as possible. In a comment, include a link to the original source. If you started from someone else’s script – whether it’s open source or…

Let’s say someone – not you, dear reader, because you would surely never be this sloppy – is building a personal web site or a diary or a company or whatever: Transact-SQL CREATE TABLE dbo.People (LastName VARCHAR(50), FirstName VARCHAR(50), Age TINYINT, EmailAddress VARCHAR(50), Password VARCHAR(50), PersonNumber VARCHAR(50)); INSERT INTO dbo.People VALUES ('Bear', 'Papa', 45, 'papa@gmail.com',…