Every release lately, Microsoft has been turning the screws on Standard Edition users. We get less CPU power, less memory, and few (if any) new features. According to Microsoft, if you want to use more than $500 worth of memory in your server, you have to step up to Enterprise Edition. Seriously? Standard Edition licensing…
Do you want to make your database server faster?
If you answered no, you can go back to manually checking that all of last night’s backups succeeded.
Did you know that you can ship a bobcat 1/30th of the time and still maintain 97% positive feedback on ebay?
What other statistical lies are lurking out there for you to find?
When you download and start playing with SQL Server 2014 CTP1, here's a few of the new instrumentation tables and views:New Internal Tablesplan_persist_context_settingsplan_persist_plan - Hey, lookie there! Implies that we can persist execution plans beyond a SQL Server service restart.plan_persist_queryplan_persist_query_textplan_persist_runtime_statsplan_persist_runtime_stats_intervalNew Viewscolumn_store_row_groupsdm_db_merge_requestsdm_db_xtp_checkpoint - Note that both the DMVs and the SSMS UI imply that Hekaton will be…
Some query hints sound too good to be true. And, unfortunately, usually they aren't quite as magical as they might seem.
Frustration with unpredictable execution times
People often learn about parameter sniffing when query execution times stop being predictable. Occasionally you'll hear about a stored procedure taking much longer than normal, but the next time you look, it might be faster.
When it comes to indexes, SQL Server is really helpful. It lets you see what indexes queries are asking for both in execution plans, and missing index dynamic management views ("DMVs"). I like to look at the DMV missing index requests using sp_BlitzIndex®.
When you look at missing index requests, it's always important to remember one of the biggest things: these missing index requests won't ever ask for or recommend a specific clustered index.
Just when you thought SQL Server couldn't get better, Microsoft is announcing the features for SQL Server 2014. They haven't announced the licensing/pricing, but I'll tell you what I do know so far.First, open this in another tab and hit play so you've got some background music while you read. Done with the commercial? Okay, let's get…
Fast - When developers ask how quickly a piece of code needs to run, don't say fast. Give them a finish line so that they can know when it's time to move on. "This query currently does over 15mm logical reads. We don't allow production OLTP queries that do over 100k logical reads - anything…
Moving between databases is hard enough, try using multiple databases in the same application and you might start thinking you've gone insane. Different application demands for accessibility, redundancy, backwards compatibility, or interoperability make this a possibility in the modern data center. One of the biggest challenges of running a heterogeneous database environment is dealing with a world of data type differences. There are two main ways to work through this situation:
Erika loves having fresh flowers around the house. Every Saturday morning, I pick up a bouquet at a farmer's market or grocery store and put it in a vase for her. I'm slowly upping my game by learning more and more about the art of arranging flowers.
When I say flowers, I bet you think about the English Garden style: a big, complex vase with all kinds of flowers crammed into every nook and cranny. It's an explosion of color and life.
Everyone wants to make sure they're getting the best performance out of their solid state storage. If you're like a lot of people, you want to make sure you're getting what you paid for, but how do you know for sure that the drive is performing well?Watch that AverageThe first way to monitor performance it…
Our free server troubleshooting tool, sp_Blitz®, just learned some new tricks. If you call it like this:
EXEC dbo.sp_Blitz
@OutputDatabaseName = 'DBAtools',
@OutputSchemaName = 'dbo',
@OutputTableName = 'BlitzResults'
Key length matters in SQL Server indexes.
It's a best practice to keep your index keys as narrow as possible, and SQL Server enforces a maximum key length of 900 bytes on most "normal" clustered and nonclustered indexes.
When I'm writing a presentation or blog post, I often start here:
It's a photo of me in my office in Dallas, Texas in 2004. When I look at that picture, I remember everything like it was yesterday. I can talk at length about everything on the bookshelf, on my desk, in my drawers (the desk drawers, that is).
There are many ways to scale out your database; many of these techniques require advanced management and expensive add-ons or editions. Database sharding is a flexible way of scaling out a database. In this presentation, Jeremiah Peschka explains how to scale out using database sharding, covers basic techniques, and shares some of the pitfalls. This talk is for senior DBAs, database architects, and software architects who are interested in scaling out their database.
Taking care of your health is incredibly important (says the marathon runner). Eating right, exercising, and getting plenty of rest help you stay healthy and perform optimally. Your database server’s health is important to your company’s health. You need to take regular backups, check for consistency, and keep indexes tuned for optimal performance. Here are…
Without looking in your wallet, do you know how much cash you have? Most of us know within a few dollars. Now, without looking in your SQL Server, do you know much data is cached in memory? You probably don't and that's okay; you shouldn't know how much data SQL Server is caching in memory.…
When people say "cloud", they're simplifying a lot of different solutions into a single catchphrase. Let's break out the different options and compare them.
1. SQL Server in Amazon EC2 and Azure VMs
Amazon EC2 is a virtualization platform. Amazon buys servers, installs their secret sauce software, and rents you Windows virtual machines by the hour. Microsoft offers a similar product, Windows Azure Virtual Machines, that just went officially live.
No one knows everything, especially about SQL Server. When you encounter a problem, especially for the first time, you may not know how to solve it. I’ve seen some crazy approaches taken to fix problems – like duct tape on a car. Many times, instead of fixing the root cause of a problem, such as a poorly-performing query, a server-level change is made.
Developers and database administrators frequently clash on major questions about how to scale application performance. Are they just being stubborn, or is one side really right? Jeremiah and I recently gave a talk on this topic to the AtlantaMDF User group and we wanted to open this debate to the world. Someone's Right and Someone's…
