If you’re hiring someone who will be storing data in a database, here’s how to find out if they know what they’re doing. Includes questions like, “Explain referential integrity and where it can be enforced,” and “What’s the fastest way to get a thousand records into the database?”
Search Results for “execution plan”
Give Me a Coconut and Six Months
Tim Ford (Twitter – Blog) posed an excellent question in a blog entry called “Give Me a Coconut and Six Months“: Hold All My Calls “So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work. Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it;…
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YO! DBA Raps
Now, here’s a little story I got to tell About two bad bloggers you know so well Michelle Ufford is the @SQLFool And Ward Pond, he’s a twit, but of course he’s cool She don’t have a horsey named Paul Revere But she drops mad lyrics, you can see ’em here They’re good stuff, but…
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Book Review: SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled
My gauge of an amazing book is simple: if I’ve got a question, and I reach for the book BEFORE I search the web, then it’s an amazing book. Several times in the last two weeks, I reached for this book first.
How to Pick Blog & Presentation Topics
Stumped about what to write about? Not sure what to talk about to your local user group? I bet you’re focusing on the presentations you would ATTEND, instead of the presentations you would GIVE. When I start to think about presentations and blogs, I tend to think about things that I would personally find interesting. …
Read MoreDev, Test and Production SQL Server Environments
In a perfect world, my test/QA servers get restored nightly from production. Let’s say every night at 9pm, the production full backups kick off, and they’re finished by 10pm. At 11pm, the QA box kicks off a restore job that grabs the latest full backups off the file share and restores them. The production backups…
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Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 2, Size Matters
Last week, I blogged about the basics of SQL Server index fragmentation: why it happens, how to fix it, and how often people are fixing it. I left you with a cliffhanger: it seemed that the frequency of defrag jobs didn’t appear to affect fragmentation levels: Databases with no index defragmentation were an average of…
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Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 1, The Basics
We asked the community for index fragmentation information for data mining purposes, and the results are in – and interesting. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll talk about some of the results we found in the field. What Is SQL Server Fragmentation? SQL Server stores data in pages. To make things easy, think of…
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PASS Summit Keynote Notes (#sqlpass)
Updates It’s Friday, it’s 8:30 AM, and it’s time for another keynote. 8:30 AM – Bill Graziano just rode out on a trike! 8:40 – Two sessions will be repeated today due to high demand. At 10:45 in room 604 they’re repeating the clustering session, and 2:30 in room 6E is SQL Server on SAN.…
Read MoreStackOverflow’s SQL 2008 FTS issue solved
Whew – the Microsoft folks really came through on this one and tracked down the problem pretty quickly. I want to personally thank Denis Churin, Nikita Shamgunov and Sundaram Narayanan for their detailed investigation into the issue and helping us get it fixed. I’m going to explain the issue to help anybody else get through…
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Before you upgrade to SQL Server 2008…
This month’s Redmond Mag glows about some new features in SQL 2008, and yes, it does have a lot of cool tricks up its sleeve. But before you go upgrading your servers to get those new features, there’s one thing you need to know. New versions of SQL Server are not always faster for every…
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SQL 2008 upgrade & tuning for StackOverflow.com
I’ve mentioned Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com a few times over the years here, and it bears repeating: he writes a great blog for developers, and DBAs need to read it too. I also follow him on Twitter, and a couple of weeks ago he mentioned he was having problems deciphering execution plans: Holy cow –…
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SQL Server Database Performance Tuning
You’re a developer, DBA, or sysadmin stuck with long running queries in SQL Server, and you need to do SQL Server performance tuning. I can help! I’m a consultant, and I do this for a living. I don’t keep anything secret – I’ll tell you how you can get started, or if you prefer, you…
Read MoreSQL Server load testing: synchronized tests versus random ones
Our QA department uses Mercury TestDirector to do load testing of our .NET web apps. The basic idea is that TestDirector runs through a set of URLs to load test an application, and it can gradually scale up the number of simultaneous sessions until the datacenter is filled with smoke. When the fire alarms go…
Read MoreSQL Server training for developers: primary keys & indexes
I had to do some developer training last week and I wrote up a paper on the basics of primary keys and indexes. Sure, there’s tons of similar stuff around the net, but this is MINE, baby. Our Table: Phone Numbers For our evil training purposes, let’s say we work for the phone company, and…
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[Video] Office Hours: Speed Round
Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long-winded answers. Let’s conquer 22 questions in 15 minutes! Here’s what we discussed: 00:00 Start 01:05 JoseDBA: We just started monitoring our AlwaysOn with Datadog. Any recommendations of what to monitor that is valuable and not filling ourselves with meaningless alerts? Thanks! 01:43 Boutaga: Hey…
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Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for December 2023
New this month: more work on letting sp_Blitz run with limited permissions, nicer Markdown output, sp_BlitzLock compatibility with Managed Instances, and more. Wanna watch me use it? Take the class. To get the new version: Download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip Azure Data Studio users with the First Responder Kit extension: ctrl/command+shift+p, First Responder Kit: Import. PowerShell…
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[Video] Halloween Office Hours in Salem, MA
I visited friends in Salem, Massachusetts, home of the 1692 witch trials, and it turns out Salem is a great place to visit around Halloween! There were tours, characters in costume, witch gear shops, and all kinds of spooky-themed happenings. I sat down outside of the Charter Street Cemetery to take your top-voted questions from…
Read MoreUpdated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for October 2023
The last couple of releases have focused on running sp_Blitz with limited permissions, like not being able to see inside some user databases. Those efforts continue this month with a lot of work from Montro1981. Wanna watch me use it? Take the class. To get the new version: Download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip Azure Data Studio…
Read MoreUpdated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for August 2023
Turns out y’all actually work over the summer – there are actually cool new features this month! I think I’m actually going to have to record updated sp_BlitzIndex, sp_BlitzLock, and sp_BlitzQueryStore modules for my “How I Use the First Responder Kit” class because these features are pretty awesome. Wanna watch me use it? Take the…
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