27Feb 2013 by Grant Fritchey 18 Comments

It Is Your Fault

Professional Development
I earned my nickname. I'm proud of it. I am the Scary DBA. I don't really like to advertise my other nickname, Rant (get it, Grant shortened to another word). I earned that one too. I'm not proud of it at all. I got that one because I sometimes don't listen as much as I should and, because I tend to be more than a little passionate about my job and my databases, I would go off on a rant. And yeah, I stood in the way of some development processes and approaches that I shouldn't have. Instead of facilitating the development team and trying to understand their problems and issues, I just said "No." Usually at length. I just finished reading this post from Martin Fowler, whose work I've  enjoyed,…
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25Feb 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Saturday #187 Richmond And More

Professional Development, Redgate Software
In just a couple of weeks I'll be flying down to Richmond, VA to speak at SQL Saturday #187. I'll be presenting two topics, Backups for the Accidental DBA and Query Tuning in the Clouds. It's going to be a great event with a bunch of excellent speakers. If you're in the area, come on down and say hello. And, if you have some time on Friday before the event, Red Gate Software is hosting a special 1/2 day seminar targeting the database professional just getting started with their career. There are only a few seats left, so if you're interested, sign up quick. Steve Jones and I will be presenting on several topics from monitoring to backups, database corruption and indexing. It'll be great way to learn, network, see…
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13Feb 2013 by Grant Fritchey 50 Comments

SQL Server Naming Standards

T-SQL
Want to start a fight between a bunch of DBAs or database developers? Ask them where the comma should be placed between columns in a SELECT statement. It's actually a little disturbing just how much emotional value people place in this. Almost as good, tell a database developer you don't like their naming standard. Hoo boy! The purpose of a naming standard, I think most of us can agree, is for clarity. We're defining language so that we all mean the same thing when we say it, right? We want to communicate clearly, so we're going to implement a naming standard. Fine. Sounds good. And then, you get this: dbo.tblDdltbl Umm... Wait. What? And there are hundreds of these, all with the same first three letters, tbl. Oh, wait, I…
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06Feb 2013 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

DBAs and the Dark Closet

Professional Development
For many years, I loved being a DBA because, unlike being a developer, I could sort of hide from the world. I could go into a dark closet (a well-lit cube, but hang with me here) and hide from everyone (except the people in the cubes next to me, my boss, the teams I supported, the people I passed on the way to the toilet, others) and just be a hermit (except for the daily stand-ups, weekly status meetings, occasional training) and only ever talk to people when things went wrong at 3AM (or at 2PM when the CIO and a bunch of other managers would be standing in my desk). As long as I did my job well, maintaining the backups, running maintenance, and setting appropriate security settings, I…
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04Feb 2013 by Grant Fritchey 8 Comments

New DMO in Azure SQL Database: sys.dm_db_wait_stats

Azure
I just did a series of Boogle searches and when that didn't find anything I tried Ging. Neither listed sys.dm_db_wait_stats. Nothing in a search directly against MSDN either. So, let me introduce you to a new DMO, sys.dm_db_wait_stats. It's a dynamic management view since it doesn't require any input. The output is about what you would expect if you thought about it for a second:   In short, what we have is the sys.dm_os_wait_stats moved internally into your SQL Database so, even though you cannot get at any of the OS counters from with an a SQL Database normally. In short, thanks Microsoft. Now we can see the wait statistics on our Azure SQL Database in order to better understand where things are problematic. Without documentation I don't know for…
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