Blogs

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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Next Door to Derpton - When Your Fellow DBA is a Danger to Databases (Dear SQL DBA)

What do you do when your fellow DBA is a ticking time-bomb of bad decisions, waiting to explode your production environment?

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Merging Boundary Points: Does a Changing Partition_Number Indicate Data Movement?

I received a question from a reader who was testing out a partitioning architecture:

We are testing table partitioning using one filegroup per partition. When we merge a boundary point, we see that partition_number changes in sys.partitions. Does this mean that data movement is occurring?

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Lost in Performance Troubleshooting - Perf Triage for SQL Server

Psssttt – I have an updated blog post on this called the Learner’s Guide to SQL Server Performance Tuning

The SQL Server is slow, what should you do? I answer a reader question and share my strategy for performance troubleshooting.

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Testing an Insert for Race Conditions with Ostress.exe

Whenever we have multiple sessions modifying data, things get tricky. When we have a pattern of “check if the data exists and then do a thing,” multiple sessions get even more complicated.

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Bleeding In Edgeville - When Upgrades Come Too Fast (Dear SQL DBA)

In this episode of “Dear SQL DBA,” I answer a question about early adoption of SQL Server, discuss why testing in production isn’t necessarily crazy, and recommend how to handle requests to upgrade your SQL Server to use new features.

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