Articles

Nuggets of Genius in Easy-to-Carry Sizes

Here’s some of our more popular articles. You can also search by keyword or terms with the search above.

Perfmon Tutorial for SQL Server DBAs – how to set up Perfmon, what SQL Server Perfmon counters to track what the indicators mean.
SAN Storage Performance Tuning for SQL Server – with guidance for specific makes and models of storage.
Bottlenecks and Bank Balances – is page life expectancy of 214 a good thing or a bad thing? What do metrics really mean? There’s only one answer: it depends.
SQLServerPedia’s T-SQL Code Library – includes a great index defrag script, missing index DMV script and indexes-not-in-use script.
SQL Server Partitioning: Not the Answer to Everything – table partitioning is one of those features that works great in theory, but not necessarily in practice.
SQL Server 2005 Setup Checklist – some simple configuration tweaks can get you 20-30% performance increases right from the start without spending any extra money.
More Performance Tuning Posts

Part 1 – Where Are the Junior DBA Jobs? – Why you don’t see junior DBA jobs in the paper.
Part 2 – You Have More Experience Than You Think – you can’t get experience without a job, and you can’t get a job without experience. Or can you?
Part 3 – Getting Training on the Job – how to get the company to train you while you work.
How to Get Your First DBA Job – a reader asked how to do it, and I gave a few ways to get started.
Should I Specialize? – lots of readers commented on this article about whether you should learn a lot of things, or just a few.
Certifications Are the Icing on the Cake – wondering whether or not you should get a certification?

Top 10 Best Questions to Ask a Senior SQL Server DBA – good questions to ask in an interview to find the best candidates.
Top 10 Developer Interview Questions About SQL Server – the best questions to ask in an interview of a developer who will be storing data in SQL Server.
More SQL Server Interview Questions

SQL Server Backup Best Practices – my own best practices for backing up databases from the 10+ years I’ve been doing it.
Back Up To The Network, Not Local Disk – I explain why you shouldn’t write your SQL Server backups to the same disks your data lives on.
Backup Software Series – why native SQL Server backups suck, why third party tools make backups go faster, and why multi-core CPUs are changing the game.