Tom LaRock has a new meme for Meme Monday. It’s all about the problems caused in your system other than disks. Thankfully, despite the title, I don’t have to list 99 separate things, only 9, but you know what, 99 is possible. I’m going to present the problems. You find the solutions on your own today. Let’s go. Recompiles I’ve seen queries so big that they take more than three minutes to compile. That’s the edge case, but as an edge case it is educational. The most important thing to remember about recompiles is that they are driven by data changes. Once a threshold is reached on any given set of statistics, all queries referencing that set of statistics gets marked for recompile. The key words and tricky phrase here…
Welcome once more to the Miskatonic branch of SQL University. I see that most off you survived out last encounter… uh, class. Most of you even appear somewhat sane… somewhat. Today we’re going to talk about PowerShell and it’s use with SQL Azure. Which sounds a something like an eldritch horror breaking in from some outer dimension… hmmm… that could explain certain things… So, back to Powershell and SQL Azure. You can’t run Powershell from SQL Azure. Thank you for attending and enjoy your trip home. Still here? I did try. Let’s clarify. You can’t run PowerShell from SQL Azure, but I didn’t say that you couldn’t use SQL Azure as a target for PowerShell. It is possible to connect to your SQL Azure databases running PowerShell from a local…
Greetings. Welcome once more to the Miskatonic University branch of SQL University. Does anyone know where to buy some camping equipment, cheap? I’ve been tagged to go an expedition to Antarctica and I need some cold weather gear a bit more substantial than my LL Bean boots. Evidently the last expedition found some caves in some mountains down there. Sounds like the perfect place to get away from all the crazy stuff that goes on here at Miskatonic. I mean, what could happen? Anyway, our last several talks have all been about indexes and indexing. One of the things that we haven’t talked about is how to tell if, how or when your indexes are being used. Starting with SQL Server 2005, and continuing to 2008 and R2, there has…
It’s over. It’s finally over. This year, unlike previous years, Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) was very good about delegating the work. Which, is actually a mixed blessing. I did a lot more work this year than I have done in years past. Luckily, we had more help this year from, new MVP, Mike Walsh (blog|twitter) and Tom LaRock (blog|twitter). The team came together and pulled off the event with the help of a great set of volunteers. Of special note, Allen White’s (blog|twitter) wonderful wife, Cindi, stood at the front desk all day, and in other ways helped us organize and run the event. It would not have been the same without her. Thanks so much. We couldn’t have pulled it off without our vendors. Here is the rather substantial list.…
Just… Wow. What an event. What a great group of people. I’m just so lucky to be involved with fantastic individuals like these. Thanks for having me out to play everyone, I really appreciated it. SQL Saturday #67 started for me with my second FreeCon (follow the link for details on the first one). Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) put together another great session where we spent a lot of time talking about blogs and blogging as well as swoops through other topics. We, by the way, is like a who’s who of great SQL Server people. I’m not going to post the list just in case everyone doesn’t want to be outed. However, I found the event extremely useful. I have a ton of notes and action items for myself and…
It sure seems like there’s a lot of miscommunication between developers and database specialists. In fact, the communication can become so poor that outright hostility between the groups is common. At the end of the day we are all working towards a common goal, to add value to whatever organization we are working for. It's a shame that we all lose sight of this commonality and create such a false dichotomy between the groups. I think there are some ways that we, as database specialists, can use to attempt to cross that gap. Prior to being suborned to the dark side, I was a developer. I had a little over 10 years experience working in VB, Java & C#. I remember, distinctly, cursing our database team for being so problematic…
I just received 35 speaker evaluations from SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. It was a great event (although I had a hard time getting there) and I really enjoyed giving my presentation on “Gathering and Interpreting Performance Metrics†(a warm-up presentation of part of my SQL Rally pre-con). Feedback is a wonderful gift. Thanks to everyone who filled out the eval and especially to those who commented. The evals have six questions and an area for comments. The questions are rated from Very Poor to Excellent. I’ve decided to assign them number values from 1-5. The overall average is 4.82. Here are the breakdowns per question: How would you rate the usefulness of the session information in your day-to-day environment: 4.79 How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills: 4.85…
Automation is the separation point for the professional DBA from the amateur. That makes this a very important topic. Thanks to Pat Wright (blog|twitter) for coming up with something great to write about and hosting the event. I recently wrote an article for the SQL Spackle series over on SQL Server Central on how to “Set Up and Schedule a Server Side Trace.†That covers well what to do to set up a trace on your system so that you can automate it. But I think I left out a few details that I think are worth pointing out here. The basics on creating the Server Side Trace using Profiler and scheduling it using SQL Agent are well covered in the article. The extra areas I want to address are…
First, let me thank Erin Stellato (blog|twitter) and all the volunteers for running such a great event. Nicely done. This event was to be my very first walk on to the public stage as a Red Gate employee, so I was excited about getting there. About 10 minutes before I left for the airport, I got a call from the airline. My flight had been cancelled, but no worries, they rescheduled everything for me. Instead of flying to LaGuardia and then on to Cleveland, I would fly past Cleveland to Chicago and then back to Cleveland, getting there at 7:30PM instead of 4:30PM. Ah well. What are you going to do. I’d prefer not to go to Chicago, but everything should be fine… The plane was supposed to leave Chicago…
Andy Warren has posted another one of his excellent summaries of what’s going on at the PASS Board. Andy, thanks for what you do. Those of us who care about what goes on at PASS really appreciate your posts. The discussion under consideration this time is the location of the PASS Summit. As you may be aware, it’s been held in Seattle for several years now and will be there for at least two more years going forward. It seems that the board is leaning, extremely heavily, towards making it a permanent fixture in Seattle. I can see why they might do this. First, and biggest, it’s next door to Microsoft. That means the Summit gets tons and tons of Microsoft Employees in attendance, which is a huge draw and…