Sometimes we learn things in the wrong order. Or skip a step. If you’re just starting out as a SQL Server DBA, here are three questions that you need to be able to answer at any given time. If you aren’t 100% sure that you can handle these questions at 3 AM when you’ve had a few drinks, it’s time to revisit them.
I love writing presentations. I like outlining them, I like writing the demos, putting the slides together. I even like reconsidering everything, backing up, scrapping it, and starting from a new approach!
But I hate writing abstracts. It’s just tough to capture your vision in the format a conference organizer wants. And often, if I’m writing the abstract before the presentation is done, I’m wary about possibly describing something that I’ll want to change later.
SQL Server Availability Groups are growing up. SQL Server 2016 adds more features and improvements, and these include options to run SQL Server in different domains, or without a domain.
Want a new kind of sample data? Maybe you want to use it to learn, or to do a project with it. Either way, you can blog about to build up your experience, resume, and share it with the community.
I recently gave LittleKendra.com a bit of a refresh. I wanted the website to be colorful, personal, and approachable.
Joins can be tricky. And where you put your ‘where’ clause may mean more than you think! Take these two queries from the AdventureWorksDW sample database. The queries are both looking for data where SalesTerritoryCountry = ‘NA’ and they have the same joins, but the first query has a predicate on SalesTerritoryCountry while the second has a predicate on SalesTerritoryKey. /* Query 1: Predicate on SalesTerritoryCountry */ select ProductKey, OrderDateKey, DueDateKey, ShipDateKey, CustomerKey, PromotionKey, CurrencyKey, fis.
Execution plans got a cool new piece of diagnostic information in SQL Server 2012 SP3, SQL Server 2014 SP2, and SQL Server 2016: “Number of Rows Read”. In fancy language, this is “better diagnostics” when a query plan has “residual predicate pushdown” (KB 3107397).
It’s a big week for me! I’m moving on from Brent Ozar Unlimited.
Recompile hints have been tough to love in SQL Server for a long time. Sometimes it’s very tempting to use these hints to tell the optimizer to generate a fresh execution plan for a query, but there can be downsides.
I recently gave a day long session at the SQLPASS Summit called “SQL Server Index Therapy Session”. 61 people attended, and let me tell you I was thrilled with that number. I’ve co-presented lots of day and week long sessions, but this was the first day long session that I’d ever done solo at a conference and 61 people was a terrific number.
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