You’d love to have a job tuning SQL Servers, but you don’t have an environment to practice in. Here’s how to teach yourself performance tuning and prepare yourself to land and succeed in job interviews.
You need to change an INT column to a BIGINT in a large table. Learn why this schema change can make your transaction log explode, and how to avoid it.
Sometimes you need to script out all the indexes in a database. Maybe you’re concerned something has changed since they were last checked in. Or maybe the indexes aren’t checked into source control, and you’re working on fixing that. (Important!)
Either way, sometimes you need to do it, and it’s not fun through the GUI. I needed to write some fresh demo code for this recently, and I needed it to give the details for partitioned tables using data compression, and I thought I’d share.
I got a great question from a student recently:
In your opinion, where is the distinction between Junior DBA and Senior DBA? I’ve always worked on small teams, so sometimes it’s hard to tell where I fit.
I learned to do Change Management from some really smart people. When I first became a DBA, I worked at a small software company where changes were released with increasing frequency over the years. Our team was really great at planning and deploying changes, because we constantly worked at improving.
When you need to measure how long a query takes and how many resources it uses, STATISTICS TIME and STATISTICS IO are great tools for interactive testing in SQL Server. I use these settings constantly when tuning indexes and query.
Patching isn’t fun. It’s time consuming, thankless, and easy to break stuff.
But you can’t skip it. For critical systems, you need to subscribe to patch lists for SQL Server and review issues that are fixed regularly.
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