SQL Server

If you’ve been following the blogosphere, or heading to SQL Saturdays, you’ll know that many folks are excited about the brand new SQL Server cardinality estimator (CE for short). As Kendra showed in her article The SQL 2014 Cardinality Estimator Eats Bad TSQL for Breakfast, the new CE provides dramatically improved query plans. What if…

We’ve all found those databases. They’re on your production SQL Server instance, but nobody seems to know if they’re being used, or what’s using them. Is anyone using this? You could run some sort of trace, but you’d probably drag down performance on your SQL Server. What you need is a quicker way to find…

Extended Events were introduced with SQL Server 2008. Extended Events is a replacement for Server Side Traces and so much more – it’s a lightweight way to look at SQL Server performance, events, deadlocks, locking, blocking, and more. In this webcast, Jeremiah Peschka provides a high-level introduction to Extended Events. You’ll learn about how Extended…

You’re a developer, and you want to know: What do DBAs value? What do DBAs need from me? What does my DBA want to help me with? How big should that server be? Is the DBA judging my code? What happens if I get in trouble with my DBA? Learn the answers in this 30-minute…

Women in Technology (yes, Clippy is a woman, too) We recently got the following question for Kendra and Jes in the Brent Ozar Unlimited® mailbox: Six months ago I stumbled into the IT world. Do you have any advice for someone (a woman) starting off in the IT industry, specially someone without a computer science…

SQL Server 2014 contains some interesting new features. Although SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to 128GB of memory, teams deploying on Standard Edition have an option to fit more of their working set in low latency storage – SQL Server Buffer Pool Extensions. How SQL Server Normally Deals With Data During SQL Server’s normal…

Analyzing a workload can be difficult. There are a number of tools on the market (both free and commercial). These tools universally reduce workload analysis to totals and averages – details and outliers are smeared together. I’m against using just averages to analyze workloads; averages and totals aren’t good enough, especially with the tools we…

Is this really happening? Sometimes I run into a query plan that just shocks me. It’s like looking up and suddenly seeing an adult dressed as a squirrel riding a unicycle down a busy city street. You have to stop and ask yourself, “Did that really just happen?” (I live in Portland, Oregon, so yeah,…

On my East Coast user group tour last month, I presented my How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine course to a few hundred folks. I’m always trying to learn and adapt my delivery, and I noted a lot of attendee questions this round, so I updated the course. This is my favorite course…

Data compression can have many uses and advantages, but it also has its drawbacks. It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all strategy. One of the things to be aware of is that initial compression of a table or index can take quite some time, and will be resource-intensive. It also is an offline operation, so the object…

It’s time to learn another new set of acronyms. Effective today, Microsoft’s as-a-service brand is changing names again. As recently as last week, the product’s name had been changed from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, but industry observers noted that Microsoft’s web pages actually referred to a different name – Microsoft Cloud. “Our research found that the…