Blog post #3 in support of Tim Ford’s (b|t) #iwanttohelp, #entrylevel Read more about Tim's challenge here. It's very easy to think of SQL Server backups as a technical problem. You have so much stuff going on, BACKUP DATABASE commands, recovery models, BACKUP LOG commands, Differential backups. Getting them all into the correct order and automating the processes sure seems like a technical problem. It isn't. It's all about the business. If you're taking on the duties of a DBA whether you're an accidental DBA, a reluctant DBA or you were voluntold into the DBA position, you need to plan to sit down with responsible parties from the business and get an understanding with them regarding RPO and RTO. RPO is a TLA for Recovery Point Objective. The easiest way to…
I'm finally getting back out to community events so I should be able to avoid giving this gigantic honor to professional speakers for a month or two. My Speaker of the Month for February 2016 is Ron Dameron (b|t) I saw Ron’s presentation Monitoring & Alerting for Azure SQL Database at SQL Saturday Tampa. It was a good presentation (or it wouldn’t be here would it). I especially like the topic. As more people move on to the Azure platform, this is the sort of information they’ll need. Ron spent a lot of time setting up slides to avoid overusing bullets. Nicely done. His delivery was clear and solid. He used Zoomit quickly and smoothly, it looked like it was just part of the presentation. His demos worked (unlike a couple…
I'm sitting in the classroom of SQL Cruise listening to Tim Ford (b|t) explain mechanisms for monitoring indexes. It's a great class. Earlier in the week I got to hear Jes Borland (b|t) talk about extended events and do a session on wait statistics. I was also lucky enough to listen to David Klee (b|t) talking about systems monitoring, especially around VMs. Argenis Fernandez (b|t) and Jason Hall (b|t) are coming up today. In short, I've received some excellent learning while on a boat in the Caribbean. Now, one could argue (and you'd be right) that I'm thinking about positivity because of the nature of the position in which I find myself. Hang on though, I have some additional points. One of the biggest strengths of the SQL Cruise is the intimacy of the…
You know you want to go on the SQL Cruise. You can. You just have to convince the boss that it's worth doing. It is. I've said it before and I'll repeat it as necessary, SQL Cruise changes peoples lives. I've watched people go on the cruise with a job and come back with a career. People don't just learn on the Cruise. They get energized. They get engaged with the data professional community. How do I profit by promoting SQL Cruise? I don't. Tim Ford is a friend and I'm supporting him. My company, Redgate Software, is a sponsor of the cruise, so I'm supporting them. I could just be doing the bare minimum in support of these parties. However, I'm not getting paid anything special by anyone for doing more.…
A great benefit that I get with my job is that I get to travel all over the place to see people present. This means I can expand out beyond my own country to see good speakers. That's the case this month. My Speaker of the Month, with all the glory it entails, is Rob Sewell and his session "Using PowerBI With My DBA Database" delivered at SQL Relay Cardiff. Rob delivered a very interesting, useful and entertaining session. It was all about how to gather data about your databases and their behavior and then put it into different types of reports in order to be proactive about stuff within your managed environment. I loved the way he put his slides together, the graphics and the lack of bullet points.…
I'm actively working to put together the leadership course that I talked about here and here. No, not full time. I still have to pay the bills with real work. But progress is going forward. I have an initial name and the principle around which we're going to do this thing: The Data Community Leadership Program will deliver a world-class platform designed to teach technology and thought leadership through direct training and mentoring in order to better grow and develop new leaders within our community. Watch this space for more about the Data Community Leadership Program. Also, this is going to be community driven and run (eventually). Feel free to provide feedback on the name and the principle.
Columnstore indexes are fascinating and really cool. Unfortunately, they're adding an interesting new wrinkle to an old problem. What's the Cost Threshold for Parallelism set to on your server? If you just said "The whatsis of whositz?" then the value is 5. The cost threshold is the point at which the estimated cost of an execution plan goes from definitely serial to possibly parallel. This default was set for SQL Server 2000 and hasn't been changed since. I've long argued, loudly, that it's too low. I've suggested changing it to a much higher value. My advice has gone from 35 to 50 and several places in between. You could just look at the median or the mode of costs on your system and use the higher of those values as…
No, that's not a threat. It's an offer to help out. Redgate Software is very serious about the efforts we're putting into creating the tools needed to support your Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) processes. DLM is a vital part of supporting both Agile development methods and moving towards an automated DevOps style of systems management that tightly integrates your software development and deployments with your database development and deployments. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can get really good at performing manual tasks, or you can get really good at automation. You want to get good at automation and we're here to help. Getting a smooth process from source control, continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment can be a lot of work, but work with huge…
I live for questions. And my favorite questions are the ones where I'm not completely sure of the answer. Those are the questions that make me stop presenting in order to take a note so I can try to answer the question later, usually in a blog post. Guess where we are today? I was asked at SQL Bits in London about the direct impact of the PERSISTED operator on calculated columns, both inserts and selects. I didn't have a specific answer, so I wrote it down for later (and asked the, self-described, persisting Dane, to email me to remind me. He did, so I put together a few tests to try to answer his question. First, I created three tables: CREATE TABLE dbo.PersistTest ( PersistTestID INT IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL PRIMARY…
I get around quite a bit. Next week I'll be visiting three cities in Germany talking to user groups in Frankfurt, Cologne and Munich on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of March, respectively. Here's the one link I can find for information. EDIT: Here's Cologne and here's Munich. Next, you can see me at the Redgate DLM Seminar in Silicon Valley on March 27th. It's a free event and there are a few seats left. Click here to register. The next day I'll be presenting at Silicon Valley SQL Saturday on March 28th. After that, I'm staying close to home to get to Boston SQL Saturday on April 18th. Then, one of the big events this year, I'll be travelling to my very first PASS Business Analytics Conference in Santa Clara, California,…