The BabbyNames Sample Database - Now on GitHub
1960 was the most popular year to name your baby ‘Dino’, with 386 Dinos born.
Will the Cloud Eat My DBA Job? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 31)
Will cloud services render DBAs obsolete? Does the cloud mean that developers will use less of SQL Server? In this post I talk about the future of database administration and give tips on strategizing your career.
Understanding avg_total_user_cost and avg_user_impact in Missing Index Requests
The hardest thing about looking at index requests in SQL Server is understanding what the column names mean.
Adding Partitions to the Lower End of a Left Based Partition Function
I recently got a table partitioning question from a reader:
We now need to load some historical data into the table for 2013 so I want to alter the function and schema to add monthly partitions for this. But I can’t work out how to do this using SPLIT? Every example and tutorial I’ve looked at shows how to add new partitions onto the end of a range, not split one in the middle.
Confused by sp_who2 (Dear SQL DBA Episode 30)
This week’s ‘Dear SQL DBA’ question gets us down to the essentials: how to I tell if a transaction is hanging?
The Top 3 Mistakes I Made Fighting Blocking
At the beginning of the “Troubleshooting Blocking and Deadlocks” course, I mention that it took me a long time to get into using the tools I show in the course.
The tools are all free, and many of them are built into SQL Server.
Update: the course itself is now free, too!
New online course: Troubleshooting Blocking & Deadlocks for Beginners (Free!)
I made y’all a SQL Server style Valentine’s day present: a new FREE online training course.
Should I Learn Fulltext Indexing? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 29)
This week’s question is about a longstanding feature in SQL Server that sounds really cool: full-text search. If you’re learning performance tuning, how much time should you invest in researching and learning about full-text indexes?
Understanding Left vs. Right Partition Functions (with Diagrams)
You’re designing table partitioning, or you want to make a change to an existing partition function. It’s critical to understand the difference between how “left” and “right” partition functions behave, but the documentation is a bit confusing on this topic.
Index Types: Heaps, Primary Keys, Clustered and Nonclustered Indexes (Dear SQL DBA Episode 28)
I see HEAP tables are found even when I know those tables have a clustered index, and I see a lot of forwarded records. This happens to 5 tables in my database. I can see the clustered and in some ones the non-clustered indexes… why are some scripts reporting them as heaps?