SQL Server

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Jess Pomfret asked for our favorite life hacks. My life hack is a half-hour hourglass. (Halfhourglass?) Seriously, an actual physical object: I keep it on my desk. Whenever I start working on a task, I flip the glass. After 30 minutes, I need to stop and assess the progress I’ve…

Create a table and insert a couple of rows: Then back up the database without using compression, and open up the backup file with a hex editor: The same trick works on the data file, too. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the post. Look, not every post is groundbreaking: sometimes it’s just about writing down…

Last week, I noticed that an awful lot of you were buying my Level 2 and Level 3 Bundles with your own personal money (not company cards), so I wondered – if your company wasn’t paying for it, were they giving you time off? So I polled to ask if you were interested in taking…

If you’ve been doing performance tuning for several years, or graduated from my Mastering Server Tuning class, you’ve come across Read Committed Snapshot Isolation, aka RCSI, aka multi-version concurrency control, aka MVCC, aka optimistic concurrency. It’s not the way SQL Server ships by default, although it is the default for Azure SQL DB, and it’s part…

I had the pleasure yesterday of spending an hour chatting with Andy Leonard and Frank La Vigne for the Data Driven podcast. Some of the questions they asked me include: How did you find your way into data? What’s your favorite part of your current gig? Complete this sentence: when I’m not working, I enjoy…

When the developers at your company are working on building an app, where do they work? Production, a development database restored from production, or a development database with made-up contents? One-question poll, and you can watch the live results. I’ll post the results and my thoughts on Friday. I know what I see regularly out…

I’m coming to Salt Lake City in August for SQLSaturday #887. On Friday, I’ll be teaching a one-day pre-con: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos – You’re a developer or DBA who wants to tune indexes and queries to make your application go faster. You don’t like learning by watching slides or reading white papers – you…

When you build a VM for SQL Server in Amazon EC2, Azure VMs, or Google Compute Engine, it’s all too easy to overlook the CPU speeds that you’re getting. Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter because SQL Server isn’t usually CPU-bottlenecked: your queries are doing table scans with 16GB RAM, starving for IO throughput.…