It’s worth noting that a lot of people will never need to create their own database. You may never create your own tables or other data structures either. You may only ever run backups and restores and manipulate the security on the system and let application installs create databases for you. That’s completely understandable and perfectly in line with the needs of many businesses and many accidental DBAs. However, it's a good idea to understand what this stuff is and how it works as part of understanding SQL Server. A Database Is Actually Files You need to store information that you want to be able to retrieve later. It’s necessary that you organize that information. If you were working with a word processing program, you store different documents in different…
The best way to learn any software is to start using it. There are a bunch of software tools in the SQL Server toolbox, but the biggest and most important is SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SSMS is where you'll spend most of your time when you start to work with SQL Server. It provides a very large series of graphical user interfaces for creating databases, setting up security, reading data out of the database, and all sorts of other things within your SQL Server instances, the databases stored there, and all the stuff inside those databases. It also supplies you with an interface to the basic scripting language of SQL Server, through which you can do almost anything to the server. The scripting language is called Transact Structured Query…
To get started with SQL Server, you need to install it. However, I'm not going to teach you how to do a SQL Server install. Instead, I want to point you towards a couple of sources of information, and, give you some alternatives to installing SQL Server. Install SQL Server As much as I enjoy sharing information with you through this blog, and despite the fact that I read a lot of other technology blogs and other resources online, the single best source of information on SQL Server remains Microsoft and their SQL Server Documentation. This information is up to date and very well maintained. Yes, I'm sure you can find somethings to complain about in there, but overall, it's the starting point for all SQL Server learning and understanding.…
One of my favorite things about being a technologist is constantly learning new things, but, this can lead us to forget about the fundamentals. More importantly, in our pursuit of the latest and greatest things, it's very easy for those of us who teach to forget to reach back and pull others forward. With this in mind, I'm going launch a new blog series called Database Fundamentals. Database Fundamentals The goal here is simple. I'm going to talk about the basics. Creating a database. Creating tables. Inserts, selects, primary keys, and on and on. I have a bunch of material accumulated around these topics. I may as well share it as much as I can. I will continue posting information about all the fun cutting edge stuff I get to…
I'm learning how to speak German. Interestingly enough, you don't start off reading dissertations. Instead, you begin by learning the names of things, Teller for plate, Buch for book. The fundamentals. I'm a third degree black belt in Ken Ryu Kenpo. But you don't start that, or continue it, by learning complex kata. Instead, you start with how to make a fist, how to hold your hands up in a defensive stance. The fundamentals. I've been doing crossfit and Olympic weightlifting for a couple of years now. I've been working hard on my clean, standing up tall during the lift, getting my elbows around quick. The fundamentals. Situation after situation, skill set after skill set, you have to get the fundamentals right. And, if you don't get the fundamentals right,…
I've had the opportunity this week to take class with Don Jones (blog | twitter), PowerShell guru and author of PowerShell 2.0 TFM (makes me laugh, each and every time). I'm not even going to attempt to try to teach you some of the amazing information Don has spent the last week pouring into my ears (since most of it spilled on the floor). But, I do want to pass on some high points, gotchas, tips, insights, that Don communicated to us during the class because they might help you pick up on the fundamentals of PowerShell. That's the most important lesson I got out of this week, you need the fundamentals to really start to put PowerShell to work. It's very easy to make the mistake that I did. I…
At the most recent SQL Bits, I gave two 20 minute sessions. I also gave one last year. There is a little bit of controversy around these (nothing real, come on), and I'd like to take a moment to record a few thoughts. Let me say this up front, and then we'll go from there:I'm not a fan. 20 Minute Sessions Can Be Challenging Most conferences have a 60 minute session as the default. Quite a few have 75 minutes too. The standard session at Bits is the 50 minute session (which, can be mildly uncomfortable when you're used to 60, but is honestly no big deal). So what are the 20 minute sessions for? You'll also see a lot of shorter sessions, usually 5-10 minutes, sometimes called lightning talks.…
I know I can say that I'm a friend of Allen White without getting into trouble. Allen and I have a shared a lot of things over the years and I'm inordinately pleased that I know the man. Thanks Allen. Allen was the very first person, ever, to say to me "Say, aren't you Grant Fritchey? You wrote that book on Execution Plans." To say I was blown away that anyone, anywhere, would recognize me, well, there's simply no way to understate this. Thank you, Allen, for the recognition. Allen has always been one of the clever ones. He was up and using Powershell almost before it was released, or so it seemed. When I was just barely starting to figure out the kind of automation I live by now,…
Under the covers, Azure SQL Database is just good old fashioned SQL Server and this includes Query Store on Azure. While many things can be different when working with Azure, Query Store just isn't one of them. Let's talk about it a bit. Query Store on Azure Unlike your databases created on a SQL Server instance (big iron, VM, hosted VM, wherever), the databases you create on Azure SQL Database have Query Store enabled by default. Managed Instance and Synapse are different. In their case, they operate the same as an instance of SQL Server, off by default. Further, in the single database of Azure SQL Database, you can't, as in can not, disable Query Store. It's on by default and it's staying that way. This leads to a simple…
Hello all! I wanted to apologize to you. I haven't been keeping up with the blog well at all over the last couple of months. I have simply been struggling with motivation. I have enough for my work commitments, but extra-curricular stuff has just been lagging. So, please allow me to say I'm sorry for not getting more sharing out there. Next, I'm making a commitment to you that I will be posting regularly again from this point forward. As a part of that, I'd sure love to hear from you on what kind of content you'd like to see. Do we need more on execution plans, or on SQL Server fundamentals? Would a bunch of stuff on Extended Events or Query Store be more interesting? How much DevOps stuff…