SQL Server

“Can you tell me a little about this code?” I asked, keeping my best poker face on. “I’m really proud of it. It gathers a whole bunch of stuff from accounting, human resources, manufacturing, you name it. I want to be able to track how we’re doing over time.” He nearly hovered in his chair…

Ever wanted to prove that your code or index changes had a positive impact? In this 30 minute video, Kendra shows you how to use Extended Events to measure a production workload– and how you can aggregate the results to prove your changes made a difference. Want to skip straight to the demos? Here’s a…

One of my favorite things about SQL Server is the instrumentation. It’s incredibly good at giving you information about what’s going on in the database engine and query optimizer. Want to know why your server is slow? Need to know what made it go offline? You have a lot of tools available. This hasn’t always…

We had a lot of fun this month teaching SQL Server classes at the San Diego Harbor Hilton. (We wrote about how we picked the cities earlier.) Even when we teach, we learn, and then we share what we learned, so here we are. San Diego Harbor Hilton We like to try new things with our…

“How many rows exist in a table?” It seems like such an innocent request. It isn’t too hard to get this information out of SQL Server. But before you open SSMS and whip out a quick query, understand that there are multiple methods to get this information out of SQL Server – and none of…

Your SQL Server is slow – but should you call us in? Jeremiah and Brent had a throw-down the other day, and we figured we’d capture it here on the blog. Brent Says You Do, and Here’s Why 5. You’ve been blindly throwing money at the problem without results. You’re on a first name basis…

The other day I was running a script I’d written to expand out some tables in the AdventureWorks sample database for some testing. The script was taking a long time, and at first I thought I was just spoiled because I usually run my tests on my laptop, whose storage is backed by SSDs. In…

Table valued parameters (TVPs) are nothing new – they were introduced in SQL Server 2008. TVPs are a great way to get data into SQL Server, and yet very few developers use them. Getting Started with TVPs In order to get started, we need to create a user defined type. This type is necessary so…

The last DBA had an unfortunate accident in Alaska. When the database administrator turns in her notice, what questions should you ask her in her last couple of weeks? I’m assuming, of course, that it was a friendly departure and you’ve got the full two weeks to have good conversations. Or maybe the DBA is…

Everyone wants reports but nobody wants to build out a separate reporting server. What options do you have short of throwing up your hands in defeat? Join Jeremiah to learn about four SQL Server technologies that help with reporting in production. This session is for DBAs and developers looking for a place to get started…

Check out SQLServerBuilds.blogspot.com, a site that lists cumulative updates and service packs. Here’s a remixed version: SQL Server Service Pack Release Dates The first service pack seems to come out fairly quickly, but after the first one, it’s a year or more. Makes sense – you find a lot of bugs quickly, right? Microsoft released…

When is a “Full Scan” not a Full Scan? The performance counter “Full scans/sec” sounds pretty scary. If you see spikes in this counter, you’re likely to think that your queries are madly scanning all the data in your tables– there are no stylish, well performant seeks, just drunken queries spewing IO everywhere. If you…