SQL Server

You’re a Database Administrator who gets the job done day in and day out– but you’re worried that maybe your skills aren’t quite up to par. How do you know if you’ve fallen behind? Join Kendra in this free webcast for a simple test to learn if your DBA knives are as sharp as they…

The database comes with a manual, but let’s be honest: nobody’s got time for that. DBAs – help me distill the most important concepts and rules down to 140-character chunks. I’ll work with Dell to compile the best tips into a free ebook for developers. SQL Server should come with warning labels, too. There’s three…

Problem: your database server’s performance stinks like Limburger cheese. Photo courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wisconsin_Limburger_Cheese.JPG Solution: find the queries that are making that smell. Hiding in Plain Sight Your database server knows exactly which queries are performing the worst. When queries are executed, the execution plans – and associated execution statistics – are stored in memory (with…

This Wednesday night, come join me at DevMynd. Here’s the topic I’ll be presenting: How StackOverflow Uses (And Doesn’t Use) SQL Server This insanely popular Q&A site serves millions of web pages per day from a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 back end. Believe it or not, the questions and answers come down to just one…

I could be talking about the tables in my database – I do make them skinny by using the right data types – but in this case I’m talking about SQL Server Reporting Services tables. You’ve seen them before. The average table is bland and boring, with nothing to distinguish it from the next, and…

I get to work with everybody. Developers need to push data in and out of the database. End users want to get reports out. Executives want to make better decisions. Vendors need to update code. Anytime something’s happening in the company, I’m one of the first to know. I get to play with new technologies…

Last week, after blogging about What Server Should You Buy, I partnered with Microsoft and Dell to host a Twitter chat about choosing the right server hardware. (Disclaimer: Dell and Microsoft paid me for my time.) Some of the interesting questions and answers included: For Dell: When are you going to have Intel Xeon E5-2600…

We work with SQL Server every day, happily sending and receiving millions of packets of data across the network. Have you stopped to think about what happens when something goes wrong? The Situation It’s a regular Tuesday afternoon. Users are happily submitting orders into the shopping cart. After browsing around the website for a while,…

Storage vendors brag about the IOPS that their hardware can provide. Cloud providers have offered guaranteed IOPS for a while now. It seems that no matter where we turn, we can’t get away from IOPS. What Are You Measuring? When someone says IOPS, what are they referring to? IOPS is an acronym for Input/Output Operations…

You’re making excuses. The database application is slow, and you’re throwing something under the bus, but we’ve got bad news. Changing it probably isn’t going to make your server faster. Here’s some of our favorite excuses. Kendra SAYS, “Your Problem Isn’t GUIDs.” Unique identifiers may or may not be globally unique, but they are one…