Processes and Practices

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',…

In our new 2-day hands-on lab course, Performance Tuning By Example, students have a series of performance tuning goals they have to accomplish. For example, in one scenario they have to fix the performance problem only using indexes, and in another they’re only allowed to change code (but not indexes.) In each lab, they have…

I’m speaking at the PASS DBA Fundamentals Virtual Chapter next Tuesday! Here’s the topic: When the phone rings, you need a repeatable process to discern the symptoms, root cause, what will happen if you don’t take action, and based on that, what actions you should take. You’ll see Brent step through several emergency scenarios live,…

HW – if all you do is rack & stack hardware, you can manage thousands of boxes. You see this at Facebook/Google type scales. OS – when you’re responsible for troubleshooting operating system problems (as opposed to simply re-imaging the box from scratch), you can manage hundreds of boxes or VMs. SQL – if you…

Servers are like milk cartons: both need an expiration date printed clearly on the outside. SQL Server 2000 When a project needs a new database server, I ask the business users, “How long does this server need to last?” Inevitably somebody gives the flip answer of, “Forever.” I laugh along with the group and then…

“I don’t care about best practices, I do what I want!” We write a lot about best practices, we teach customers best practices, and we publish popular references for best practices about all sorts of things like performance monitoring, SQL Server Setup, and Availability Groups. But the internet is a sea of information and many…