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.
Learn Index Tuning at the PASS Summit in 2016!
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be giving a pre-conference session on index tuning, plus a general session on locking and blocking at the PASS Summit in Seattle this October! Here’s a description and a video to tell you all about these sessions.
Fail Over, Fail Again, Fail Better - Preparing for Disaster Recovery (Dear SQL DBA)
You’re setting up SQL Server log shipping for disaster recovery. What else do you need to do to best prepare for a failure?
Will Query Store Work in a Read Only Database?
For static databases, it’s quite useful to set SQL Server’s “read only” database property to true. When the database is read-only, it ensures that the last backup you took is still valid… as long as nothing bad happens to that backup file.
Outside the Big SAN Box: Identifying Storage and SAN Latency in SQL Server (Dear SQL DBA)
Dear SQL DBA, What do you say to a SAN admin when you think that the billion dollar SAN *may* be the bottleneck and you just want to look into it. What are the technical things I need to say to make them believe there might be something to my questions?
Target Recovery Interval and Indirect Checkpoint - New Default of 60 Seconds in SQL Server 2016
Update, 6/21/2016: Be careful using indirect checkpoint with failover clusters if your SQL Server 2014 instance is not fully patched. See KB 3166902. This bug was fixed in SQL Server 2016 prior to RTM.
SQL Server 2016 introduces big new features, but it also includes small improvements as well. Many of these features are described in the “It Just Runs Faster” series of blog posts by Bob Ward and Bob Dorr.