SQL Server

This week, Brent, Richie, and Erik discuss execution plans for table value functions, how to prepare for the Senior DBA course, source control software, generating fragmentation, backups, and the new TV shows the team is looking forward to this season. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to…

Announcing PasteThePlan.com: An Easier Way to Share Execution Plans

Last Updated April 9, 2017

Company News, PasteThePlan.com, SQL Server

Since the dawn of man, people have struggled with sharing execution plans with each other for performance tuning. Now, it’s easy. First, get yourself a plan: Get the estimated execution plan by hitting control-L or clicking Query, Display Estimated Plan. Right-click on the graphical plan, and click View XML. Copy all of that. Or even…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/09/07 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated September 9, 2016

This week, Brent, Richie, Erik, and Tara discuss parameter sniffing, database backups, referential integrity in databases, clustering, creating and using indexes, in-place upgrades, bench marking tools, and more. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen on the go. Enjoy the Podcast? Don’t miss…

[Video] 500-Level Guide to Career Internals

Last Updated October 1, 2020

#SQLPass, SQL Server

This week , I was honored to give a session about hacking your career. Here’s the abstract: This is not yet another career session that tells you to be friendly and network. Forget that – this is about using your IT skills to reinvent the way you get paid. I’ll explain how I went from DBA to…

DBA Days: Killing TempDB softly

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, SQL Server

Don’t make me regret publishing this This really will take a server down immediately. You can restart it, as we learned during DBA Days, but… If you also go ahead and make this an Agent job that runs at startup, there are additional challenges. Like every time Agent starts up, your server goes down. Score…

DBA Days: Chaos Sloth

Last Updated February 13, 2017

I love a bad idea I mean, just look at me. I’m covered in them! So when Brent wanted to randomly make his server act crappy, I wrote a script for it. Usual caveats here. Don’t run this in production. I’m not responsible for anything you do after you hit copy and paste. In fact,…

DBA Days: Scripts from Downtime Train

Last Updated August 31, 2016

SQL Server

ostress is so much fun It’s totally free to download and use as part of Microsoft’s RML Utilities. What else is in there? Stuff I’ve never used! I hear you can read trace files or something else perfectly adequate. Even though it’s a CLI, it’s still a bit less insane and confusing than HammerDB. Plus…

DBA Days: Money for Nothing, Chips for Free

Last Updated August 31, 2016

SQL Server

Throwing hardware at it We gotta move these E5-2670 v3s These were just sitting around Dell. On a table. Not doing anything. They might have been broken; I’m not sure. But that’s not the point. The most meager of server blades hanging out here had 128 GB of RAM in it. One-hundred-and-twenty-eight. Gigabytes. Let that sink…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/08/31 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated September 9, 2016

This week, Brent, Richie, and Tara discuss corruption, resetting query stats, fixing parameter sniffing issues, how to suggest features for our scripts, and why Brent is sporting an Oracle sweatshirt. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen on the go. Enjoy the Podcast?…

First Responder Kit 2016-09: sp_Blitz, sp_BlitzCache, sp_BlitzIndex Improvements

Last Updated February 13, 2017

First Responder Kit, SQL Server

First, thanks to 5 community volunteers for contributing code this month. In addition to lots of bug fixes, small stuff, and a new Github issue template (thanks, Konstantin Taranov) here’s the big improvements: sp_Blitz Changes @OutputServerName writes output to remote server (Haris Khan) – for years, these stored procs have had an @OutputServerName parameter just waiting to…

Upcoming SQL Server 2019 Features

Last Updated April 11, 2019

Humor, SQL Server 2019

If you think that’s big, you should see the size of the drink I happened to be in Seattle this week after finishing up an Alaska cruise, and I had the chance to sit down with some of the PMs responsible for upcoming SQL Server features. It turns out they’re already deep in development with…

Learn T-SQL with the StackOverflow Database

Last Updated August 28, 2016

SQL Server

Background: a company came to us with a request: they had a lot of smart people who wanted to learn the basics of T-SQL in a day. Could we build an intro-to-T-SQL course that didn’t suck? Well, sure – as long as we could give it away free on the site. So here it is: You work for a…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/08/24 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated August 28, 2016

This week, Richie and Erik discuss in-place instance upgrades, availability groups, the cloud, job security, business intelligence and user adoption, and much more! Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen on the go. Office Hours Webcast – 2016-08-24 Erik Darling: First one,…

How to Run DBCC CHECKDB on a Log Shipping Subscriber

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Backup and Recovery, CHECKDB and Corruption, Log Shipping, SQL Server

At first glance, if you set up log shipping the way most folks do, it looks like you can’t run CHECKDB on a subscriber: Database cannot be opened. It is in the middle of a restore. Please close the bathroom door. On SQL Server Enterprise Edition, you can try working around it by creating a…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Dynamically Generating 999 Indexes on a Table

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, Indexing, SQL Server

Let’s say, just theoretically, you wanted to demo a query that takes SQL Server a long time to compile. And in order to make SQL Server’s job tougher, you wanted to create the maximum number of indexes possible on a table. You might do something like this: Transact-SQL SELECT TOP 999 'CREATE INDEX [IX_' +…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Dynamically Generating Long Queries

Last Updated February 13, 2017

As part of an experiment, I needed to build a really long query. (Don’t ask.) From another recent experiment, I know that SQL Server won’t let a query return more than 65,535 columns. I set about writing a one-line query that would return 65,535. I’m a big fan of writing the simplest reproduction scripts possible –…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Building a Fork Bomb in SQL Server

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Somewhat different than a sex bomb, a fork bomb is a denial-of-service attack that just starts a process that replicates itself, thereby starting more and more processes until the service goes down. Wikipedia’s fork bomb page lists examples on most operating systems (including Windows). I’ve always found fork bombs funny because of their elegant simplicity, so…

Bad Idea Jeans Week: Prevent the Use of the Database Engine Tuning Advisor

Last Updated February 13, 2017