Should I Automate my Windows Updates for SQL Server? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 10)
Your boss wants you to automate patching for your SQL Servers. Is that a good idea? How far should you take it? Find out a DBAs perspective.
Why an Upgrade can Cause Performance Regressions (Dear SQL DBA Episode 9)
You finally got approval to move to new hardware and a fresher version of SQL Server. After months of work, you do the migration and then… performance gets worse. What can cause this, and what do you look for?
Free Poster: Cat DBA Says Not Right Meow
You’ve got 99 problems, and the request coming in ain’t one.
Maybe you need to channel your inner Cat DBA, just for a moment.
Coming to SQL Saturday Portland? Plan a Vacation, too!
SQL Saturday Oregon will be held on Oct 22, 2016 this year– the weekend before the SQL PASS Summit.
As a Portlander, I love it when people come visit my town! Please consider taking a few extra days to enjoy checking out PDX before or after the event.
MAXDOP of Confusion (Dear SQL DBA Episode 8)
Learn how to configure the Max Degree of Parallelism and Cost Threshold for Parallelism settings in SQL Server - and how SQL Server 2014 SP2 and SQL Server 2016 change the way that SQL Server automatically configures some SQL Servers with lots of cores.
Is User Acceptance Testing Covered Under Developer Edition?
Holy mackerel, it is!
How to Level Up Your DBA Career (Dear SQL DBA)
You’re a Junior or mid-level Database Administrator with no obvious career path. How do you grow the right skills to level up your DBA career?
Which Indexes are Disk Based in SQL Server?
I was looking through some terms in SQL Server documentation the other day, thinking about what it’s like to learn about SQL Server’s indexes when you’re new to the field. I jotted down a note: B-tree = Rowstore = Disk Based.
And then I realized that’s not quite right.
Index Usage Stats Insanity - the oddities of sys.dm db index usage stats (Dear SQL DBA)
SQL Server’s “index usage stats” dynamic management view is incredibly useful– but does it tell you what you THINK it tells you?
I explain the quirks of how sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats works and why the information is so valuable.
SPLIT in a LEFT Partition Function: Where Does the Above-Boundary Data Go?
Table partitioning seems simple, but there’s a lot of complexity in designing and managing it if you decide to use filegroups and splitting.
When you first implement partitioning in this scenario, you decide where you’re going to keep “out of bound” data when you create your partition scheme. Be careful when you make that decision, because it may not be easy to change later.