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How to Upgrade SQL Server Evaluation Edition to Developer Edition
Six months ago today, you installed SQL Server Evaluation Edition. You told yourself you’d take care of that sooner or later, and…you forgot. Now, your SQL Server won’t start: Error 17051: SQL Server...
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Sit Down. We Need to Talk About Your Scalar Functions.
Thanks for coming today. I apologize for baiting you in here with a picture of toilet paper. That’s not even in the US – that’s from my Iceland trip, before I flew back here to the US. Look, we all...
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Things To Consider When Submitting Sessions to Paid Online Conferences
Lots of paid conferences are happening online these days, so some of you will be presenting an online session or pre-con for the first time. I’ve done a bunch of these and been burned in a bunch of...
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You Can Disable Parameter Sniffing. You Probably Shouldn’t.
During my parameter sniffing classes, people get a little exasperated with the complexity of the problem. Parameter sniffing is totally hard. I get it. At some level, it’d be great to just hit a magic...
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What Do You Do Better Than the Cloud?
It sounds like a trick question, but I’m serious. If your company’s management is just now starting to consider the cloud in 2020, your reaction shouldn’t be to cast a shadow on cloud vendors. Instead,...
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Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for July 2020
This month, 15 community folks contributed code – I think that’s an all-time high for a single month’s release! Good work, y’all. Thanks for payin’ it forward. The bad news is that they’re almost all...
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The 201 Buckets Problem, Part 1: Why You Still Don’t Get Accurate Estimates
I’ll start with the smallest Stack Overflow 2010 database and set up an index on Location:USE StackOverflow2010 GO CREATE INDEX Location ON dbo.Users(Location); GO SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Users; GO...
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The 201 Buckets Problem, Part 2: How Bad Estimates Backfire As Your Data Grows
In the last post, I talked about how we don’t get accurate estimates because SQL Server’s statistics only have up to 201 buckets in the histogram. It didn’t matter much in that post, though, because we...
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Want Your Own Private Conference?
Your team has been reading my blog, watching my free public streams, and using the First Responder Kit scripts for years. They’ve gone as far as they can go on their own, learning from Google, and now...
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Updated First Responder Kit for July 12, 2020: Fixing sp_BlitzFirst @ExpertMode
I don’t normally do multiple releases per month, but sp_BlitzFirst had a pretty big bug in the last release for those of us who do live performance tuning. In the July release, a well-meaning...
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Where is the SQL Server Community Networking Online?
You’ve stumbled upon this blog, and you’re having a pretty good time. Now you’re wondering, “Where else can I network with database folks, get to know them, and talk shop?” You’re not getting out due...
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What If You Really DO Need to Shrink a Database?
You’ve heard that shrinking a database is bad because it introduces both external and internal fragmentation, it causes blocking, it causes transaction log growth while it runs, and it’s slow and...
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Get Alerted When Your SQL Server Restarts with sp_SendStartupMail
When your SQL Server restarts, how do you find out? I’ve seen a few senior DBAs do a really smart trick: they write a stored procedure to send them an email, and then they mark that stored procedure as...
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Announcing Saturday & Sunday Office Hours.
During the quarantines, I’m doing free training. It looks like we’re going to be stuck inside here for another long while, so for the next couple of months, I’m bringing back Office Hours, but on a...
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How to Get Started with SQL Server Management Studio
In the big picture, you need to: Download the free Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and install it, accepting the defaults Connect to your SQL Server Create a low-privileged login so that you...
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How to Install Azure Data Studio to Work with SQL Server
Download Azure Data Studio on your desktop. Do this on your desktop, not the SQL Server itself. You always want to run management tools from your own machine to reduce the overhead on the SQL Server...
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[Video] How to Think Like Clippy (Subtitle: Watch Brent Wear Another Costume)
Remember Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant from the late 1990s? He would pop up at the slightest provocation and offer to help you do something – usually completely unrelated to the task you were...
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What SQL ConstantCare® Has Been Finding In Your Servers Lately
SQL ConstantCare® analyzed over 3,000 of your SQL Servers this month. Here are the things we check for and the number of servers where we found this problem this month: Backup Back Up Your TDE...
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Remember “Nothing Stops a Hekaton Transaction?” Yeah, About That.
When In-Memory OLTP first came out, Microsoft liked to go around bragging at conferences that “Nothing stops a Hekaton transaction.” I remember hearing that and kinda chuckling at the time, and I was...
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A One-Slide Summary of the Differences Between TDE and Always Encrypted
The folks on Twitter liked this, so sharing it here: It’s a one-slide summary from a SQL Critical Care client’s deck, so obviously it’s abridged, but I think it does a pretty good job of summing things...
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