20Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 35 Comments

Time for a Quick Rant

Professional Development, SQL Server
This is an actual quote from what we can only assume is a functional human being: The database is very big so we stopped taking backup's. Eight lords a leaping are you kidding me? Seriously! Seriously? By the Great Gu and all the Valkyries in Valhalla, you stopped taking backups of your PRODUCTION database because it was "very big." And I'll put down Brobdingnagian stacks of cash that "very big" in this case is probably 200-500gb or at worst 1-2tb. People, assuming you have enough brain stem intact to regulate breathing, you must know, you must by all the sparkly vampires in Twighlight KNOW that you need to have backups. Right? I mean, nothing ever goes wrong on this shiny marble we call Dirt, does it? No one would EVER…
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15Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 17 Comments

Database in Source Control

SQL Server, Tools
Many years ago, I was working with a great DBA. Seriously, a very smart and capable guy. He told me, "We need to put the database into source control, just like app code." And I just laughed. Not because I disagreed with him. I knew he was right, but I had tried, several times, to do just that. See, I'm not really a DBA. I'm a developer. I knew that code (and all the T-SQL that describes databases is code) needed to be versioned, sourced, tracked and audited. But great googly moogly, it was not an easy thing to do. I first tried just exporting the entire database into a script and then occasionally checking that script into source control. Yay! Mission Accomplished... Well, I had a database in source…
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08Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Sausage Making

Professional Development
For those who don't know, I work for Red Gate Software. I'm not a developer, but I work directly for the development teams so I spend a lot of time with them. This week I'm over in the UK, where they are headquartered, meeting with the different teams and discussing our products, their future, issues with them, enhancements, and all the rest. Suffice to say, I'm excited by the future. But the really fun bits are when you see behind the scenes stuff. Red Gate is pretty well known for polished, intelligent, elegant UI design (yes, they keep me away from that stuff). Behind those pretty pictures though is code. And our developers are just like your developers, smart, capable, skilled, but still learning. And it's those learning bits that…
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03Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Speaker of the Month, January 2014

Professional Development
A whole new year. Cool. I was at SQL Saturday DC, #233, at the beginning of December. I sat through several really good presentations. I could honestly give the award this month to any of the ones I took notes on, but I have to pick one person (although, not always, my award, my rules). So, speaker of the month for the brand new year is Konstantin Melamud (li|t). Yet another speaker without a blog. Maybe I should enforce my own rules at some at some point. <sigh> Anyway, I enjoyed Konstantin's presentation. Let's talk about it. Performance Tuning - Index Optimization was an excellent presentation. Konstantin came at the topic very carefully. He started off with a knowledge level baseline, right at the start. I thought that was a…
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