SQL Server

Diskspeed, or diskspd.exe, is Microsoft’s replacement for SQLIO. While I’m not going to replace our SQLIO tutorial, you can use the information in here to replicate the same type of tests on your systems to get the information you need. During the Dell DBA Days, Doug and I used diskspd as one of our techniques…

Our new Triage Specialist will be using tools, forms, and methodologies that we build for our SQL Critical Care® clients, but we also make a lot of those tools available to the public for free in our First Responder Kit. Here’s how to do your own quick health assessment for free: First, start your health…

Since we’re hiring again, it’s a good time to explain what we do and how it’s evolved over the last four years. When your SQL Server’s performance or reliability is causing you business pain, and you can’t get the relief you want, you call us for a SQL Critical Care®. We use specialized tools we’ve built…

Personal Benchmark I’ve always thought that I’d know I have the right job when, if I were to win a dynastic sum of money from the lottery, or inherit it from a long-lost relative, I would still show up for work every day. This is that job. Seven months ago, when I saw that the…

It’s time to grow our consulting team! We’re looking for a SQL Server Triage Specialist. This is a new position with a whole new job description: the position is as much about communicating with clients as it is about SQL Server. I’d tell you about the job, but I’m really excited for you to read about it…

SQL Server 2016 brings support for JSON. For those of you who don’t know, JSON is JavaScript Object Notation – it’s a way of representing application level objects as a string. Imagine XML without anywhere near as much line noise, and you’re pretty much there. Our Sample Document In this example, to retrieve orders and…

Must be Dell DBA Days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn43sOLrcVs Join us live as we performance tune – and break – SQL Servers: Thursday Morning: Finding Your Slow SQL Server’s Bottlenecks in Record Time with Wait Stats Thursday Afternoon: How to Prove Hardware is the Problem Friday Morning: SQL Server High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Licensing Explained Friday Afternoon:…

5. Turning on auto-shrink It might make disk space alerts go away for a minute, but it can cause lots of problems. 4. Enabling xp_cmdshell and giving the SQL Server account administrative rights in Windows Young DBAs often do this to try to get a quick fix in place to manage backup files. Later on,…

For this year’s company retreat at the Oregon coast, we asked awesome photographer Justin Bailie to shoot updated team pictures for the site and this year’s Christmas cards. Enjoy:

Before our consulting engagements start, we send clients a couple of queries to run. One of them outputs a list of databases, and the last backup date for each. You wouldn’t believe how often this query produces surprises like: “Wait – your script must be wrong. I swear we’re backing things up. We’ll fix that.”…

There are two kinds of recruiters. The first kind is the Relationship Recruiter. These are the great ones. These recruiters take time to listen, not just to you but to their clients. They try their best to match you and your skills with a client and their needs. If the two sides don’t match well, they…