Psssttt! Developers. Man, have I got something good for you. Are your DBAs slowing down your development processes? Are they keeping you from flying down the track? Bypass them. Let's assume you're working in the Microsoft stack. Let's further assume you have an MSDN license. Guess what? That gives you access to Azure... hang on, come here. You want to hear this. Let me tell you a quick story. See, I'm not a developer (not anymore). I'm a DBA. Wait, wait, wait. I'm on your side. It's cool. I'm just like you guys, but in a different direction. See, I had a database designed and already up as a Windows Azure SQL Database. I'm working with a number of Boy Scouts on their Eagle projects. They're going around to all…
This is a long and convoluted post about my experiences at two hotels, but it has a point for DBAs and other data pros. Please stick around to the end. I stay in hotels fairly frequently. I have friends who stay at them even more than I do. We tell each other stories about turning left in the middle of the night when the bathroom in this hotel is on the right. And, we share good and bad experiences in order to help ensure that our travels are quick, safe, and as worry free as possible. All of us tend to focus on staying at one hotel chain or another in order to maximize our benefits. My personal chain is Hilton. I've recently had a very bad experience and a…
Wow! You'd think that an event might get a little worn by the third time you're doing it. That maybe it would be just a repetition of what you've done before. And, I guess, in some places, that does happen. But not here. This event was as fresh as it ever was. Maybe it was the beautiful new venue, but I don't think so. I think it was the crowd. We had a ton of great people show up, more than we expected (awesome and wonderful in and of itself), and they were an engaged, enthusiastic group. Presenting in Europe, as an American, can be quite intimidating. There's the language issues and all that. But the main thing is that people across the pond tend to get at information a…
Get an invite to a Microsoft meeting? Are they using the new Lync interface? And, you don't have a paid Office365 account do you? So, you click the link, figure it'll open a web browser and off you go, right? Wrong. Instead it opens up a Lync app that you installed with Office, or the one that comes with Windows 8. And then you're stuck. You can't log in if your office doesn't have a Lync server (office?). Thankfully, there's a simple solution. Many thanks to Michael Wood. You just add a string to the end of the URL and you're off to the web app. I couldn't find this anywhere, so I figured I'd share with those who might need the help. Just add '?sl=1' to the end of…
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…
See this: That's right. The install worked. All I had to do was get a completely clean server set up. No domain controller. Now to get my learn on. Microsoft has a web site with a number of introductory samples. I'll start there and work through them. The very first example gets me set up with some data that it builds by running a Powershell script, importdata.ps1. But I'm not going to just blindly follow along. I want to see what the heck is happening so I can start understanding this stuff. By the way, thank you Microsoft for making the samples in PowerShell and not forcing me to relearn Python or something else. That would have been frustrating. The script is really simple. It has two scenarios you can…
Just a few blog posts that you ought to go and read. First up, Tom LaRock maintains a listing of SQL bloggers split up into various cleverly named groups to show you where to go to get good information. This really is an excellent collection of bloggers. It's the people I go to when I need information. Some of them are better resources than the Books Online when they post something. Personally, I've made the list for the last several years, but Tom has decided that I'm worth of elevation, so I've gone from the Model database to the Master database. Thanks Tom. One blog that's not on Tom's list is Tom's blog. You should be reading that regularly too. And congratulations to Tom again on making MCM. Next, one…
No major updates at the moment. I still haven't played with remoting through PowerShell. I'm just living with it. Had an interesting problem start today. You can swipe from the sides to get different behaviors. Swipe in from the top or bottom and you get menu choices in the app you're in. Swipe in from the right and you get the Charms. Swipe in from the left... well, you're supposed to get the list of recent apps or the ability to set an app in another window or even switch to the previous application, all depending on how you swipe. Except, mine stopped. Hurrah. I did a bunch of poking around to figure out why this happened, hoping I'm not looking at a hardware issue (oh please, not that). When…
Welcome to Day 2 of the PASS Summit! It's been a very exciting event so far. Today I'm presenting two sessions, one on tuning queries by fixing bad parameter sniffing and one on reading execution plans. Please stop by, or watch the one on execution plans on TV as PASS is livestreaming events all day long on SQL TV (which is what I used to call Profiler). The intro video, which can be good or goofy was really good this year. They had people from all over the world talking in their native language, making the point that the PASS organization is a global community. It really is. Doug McDowell is giving us the finance and governance information for the PASS organization. I find this boring and vital at the…
Welcome to the fourth Kilt Day at the SQL PASS Summit. It might be a little silly, but it's fun. It's also Women in Technology day with the WIT Luncheon. Guys are invited. A short word about the bloggers table. Last year we were... a little loud. So this year, we were cautioned... well, more like told to be quiet or they'd take away our toys. I agree with the intent of the message, please keep it down. But the delivery... it hurt PASS at the bloggers table and upset people. As I was reminded last night by a dear, dear friend who I accidently hurt, how you deliver a message is as important as the message you deliver. But, that's OK. Let's learn from our mistakes, grow & move…