[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything in the Reykjavik Harbor
You posted and upvoted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento to pick what you'd like to see covered in a Q&A session:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRwLZERyORk
Performance Monitoring and Server Tuning
Diagnosing instance performance through waits, resources, monitoring, and baselines.
405 associated posts180 primary posts
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server at Hallgrímskirkja
I hang out by Hallgrímskirkja, the modern church in Reykjavik, and take your highly-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here's what we covered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slku6V9mWnw
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server in Stokkseyri
Before Fjöruborðið opens for lunch, I answer a few of your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento including:
00:00 Introductions
00:29 Peter: What is your opinion about the SQL generated by Entity Framework?
02:00 Peter: When would you switch from EF to stored procedures?
02:45 Always Learning DBA: What are free resources to help me transition into an architect or data scientist role?
04:43 How is the auditing and monitoring different for Azure SQL DB?
06:33 Recap
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything at the Westman Islands Harbor
You upvoted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and today I'm at the harbor in Heimaey to cover 'em.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbpo9aRWxAE
[Video] Office Hours at the Eldfell Volcano Crater
You posted and upvoted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and I ascended - well, drove into - the Eldfell Volcano in the Westman Islands to answer 'em:
https://youtu.be/dnD3qAuhBUE
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About Microsoft SQL Server
Got questions that aren't a good fit for DBA.StackExchange.com, and you want my opinion? Post them here and upvote the questions you'd like to see me talk through. This weekend, I hopped into my home studio and did a half-hour session because so many good questions had piled up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7XFeXcOZgU
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About Microsoft SQL Server
We took a break from roaming around Iceland long enough to check in at our home studio. While we were here, I did a live Office Hours session, taking your questions about Microsoft SQL Server.
https://youtu.be/MBPSFuVOFKk
[Video] Office Hours: Arctic Circle Puffins Edition
Erika and I are on the road in Iceland, roaming around the countryside, and I'm taking you with us. We visited Grímsey, a tiny island on the Arctic Circle, home to gazillions of sea birds like puffins and arctic terns. I took about half an hour to answer your most highly-voted questions from here:
[Video] Office Hours: Siglufjörður Airport Runway Edition
Erika and I are on the road in Iceland, roaming around the countryside, and I'm taking you with us. This session was shot in Siglufjörður, a beautiful little oceanfront fishing village in the north.
Yes, I'm on the airport runway. No, seriously. Here's what it looks like from the air in the winter.
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server
Erika and I are on the road in Iceland, roaming around the countryside, and I'm taking you with us. This week, we're in Siglufjörður, a beautiful little oceanfront fishing village in the north. In the mornings, before Erika wakes up, I'm filming Office Hours videos to answer your questions that you post here. The first video comes to you from a park bench next to the harbor:
Production DBA
Database Performance Tuning is Getting Much Harder.
For the last twenty years, SQL Server performance tuning has relied on a few facts: SQL Server provided a lot of performance metrics with thorough documentation from both Microsoft and the community. You could fetch those metrics in a variety of ways, like Perfmon counters and dynamic management views. Many of the metrics were cumulative…
Production DBA
Azure SQL DB Frequently Asked Questions
Let's get you some answers.
Is Azure SQL DB PaaS, IaaS, or SaaS?
Azure SQL DB is platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Microsoft manages most common database tasks for you, and they act as your DBA.
This also means that like a DBA, Microsoft will tell you "no" if you try to implement something that they don't support. There's no negotiations: the answer is just no.
Who is Azure SQL DB for?
Azure SQL DB is a good fit for new applications.
Performance Tuning
Paul White Explains Temp Table Caching 3 Ways
Paul White (Blog, @SQL_Kiwi) is a legendary SQL Server blogger who's written a ton of good material. You should read all of it. You won't, and I can say that with authority because...I don't read it all either. It's too much.
But when your job eventually requires you to understand temp tables way better than you do today, read these 3 posts in this order - which is probably different than what Paul would recommend, but I think they flow better this way:
Performance Tuning
MAXDOP Isn’t Really MAXDOP. It’s More Like DOP.
Here's how Books Online describes the Max Degree of Parallelism setting: You can use the max degree of parallelism option to limit the number of processors to use in parallel plan execution. And here's what the SQL Server 2019 setup screen says: When an instance of SQL Server runs on a computer that has more…
3 Ways to Run DBCC CHECKDB Faster
In my last post, I talked about how you can get 43%-67% faster backups. Today, I'm using that same SQL Server setup to discuss how throwing more CPU cores might help you check for corruption faster if you've already got modern fast storage. I don't expect everyone to go to this level of detail by any means, but it's the kind of tuning you can do when you're facing multiple terabytes of production data per server and shrinking maintenance windows.
sp_Blitz Pro Tips for Managing Multiple Servers Centrally
sp_Blitz is a free health check script that gives you a prioritized list of things to fix on your SQL Server. Here's what the output looks like: Most of the time, you'll want to work through the warnings in the order that they show up in the results, in priority order. How to Skip Checks…
sp_BlitzIndex Pro Tips for Consultants & Contractors
sp_BlitzIndex analyzes the design & health of your clustered & nonclustered rowstore indexes and gives you suggestions on how to get higher performance without changing your queries.
If you run it with no parameters, you get advice on the indexes in the current database:
T-SQL & Development
How Do I Know If My Query Is Good Enough for Production?
When I ask that question, here are some of the things I think about: How many times am I going to run it? Is it a one-off task, or is it going to run thousands of times per second on the front page of a popular web site? What time of the day/week will it…
How to Find Out Whose Queries are Using The Most CPU
You've got a bunch of users on the same SQL Server, and you wanna know who's using the most resources. SQL Server doesn't make this easy. You can query some management views to see which queries or databases have been using the most resources, but you can't intuitively tell which USERS are.
To solve this problem, we're going to use Resource Governor.
Production DBA
SQL Server Problems We Don’t Have Anymore
I was cleaning out a folder of presentations and I realized there are a whole slew of problems that we had to worry about ten years ago, and they just hardly ever come up today. Virtual Log Files (VLFs) - it's been years since I've run across a server where this was an issue. I…
