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Reading the New Fast Track Reference Architectures from HP & EMC
James Serra caught three new SQL Server 2014 Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture designs released by EMC, HP, and Lenovo. I love reading these because they show each vendor’s...
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Oracle HA & DR Basics [With Video]
Oracle has different availability and recovery options from SQL Server. Being aware of what these options are and how you can use them will go a long way toward keeping your Oracle boxes just as safe...
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How Would You Change AlwaysOn Availability Groups?
SQL Server 2012 introduced AlwaysOn Availability Groups, a way to achieve high availability, disaster recovery, and scale-out reads. SQL 2014 brought some improvements around higher uptime and more...
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How many CPUs is my parallel query using in SQL Server?
Parallelism can be confusing. A single query can have multiple operators that run at the same time. Each of these operators may decide to use multiple threads. You set SQL Server’s “max degree of...
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New Online Instructor-Led Course: Database Maintenance Starter Kit
BYO popcorn We’re changing things up a little bit. Jes Schultz Borland and I are offering a brand new course that combines two things we love: Video training where you can learn anytime A live...
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Black Friday Sale: Free $29 Coupon – And a Test
SQL Server’s Maximum Degree of Parallelism (MAXDOP) controls the number of processors that are used for the execution of a query in a parallel plan. Pop quiz: what’s our favorite knowledge base article...
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Black Friday Sale: Learn to Read Execution Plans for $99
You’re comfortable writing queries, but some of them are slow – and you need more ways to tune than just adding indexes. You’ve heard that you should read execution plans, but you don’t know where to...
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Black Friday Sale: 30% Off In-Person Classes
So you didn’t get in on the midnight doorbuster sale for 50-90% off our in-person classes, and now you’re kicking yourself because your boss gave you permission to attend. Coupon EasyPainRelief will...
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Black Friday Sale: 40% Off Training Videos
So you didn’t get in on the midnight doorbuster sale for 50-90% off our training videos, and you’re jealous of all the cool kids who got up early. Coupon FunTrainingAtHome will take 40% off any of our...
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Black Friday Sale: Free $299 for the Last Holdouts
All day long, you’ve been watching and waiting, thinking you could resist a killer deal. Coupon LastHoldout299 gets you $299 off any of our $299 training videos, including: How to Read SQL Server...
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Brent’s Bad Idea Jeans [Video]
Over the years, I’ve come up with some rather “interesting” answers to SQL Server problems including: Warming up SQL Server’s buffer pool by selecting all the data from all the tables Creating indexes...
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Transactional Replication Architecture: Isolating Subscriber Tables
The best part about transactional replication is that it’s flexible. And the worst thing about transactional replication is that it’s flexible. A poor replication configuration will cause you...
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Doug Broke It: Microsoft Access Data Types [Video]
In this video, Doug talks about how changing a column’s data type in SQL Server can be dangerous when there are Access clients using it, and a reference table to help avoid type mismatches when...
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Who’s Allowed to Add Indexes to ISV Apps?
Performance tuning of independent software vendor (ISV) databases is a little tricky. To understand who does what, let’s think through all of the work required with building and hosting a database...
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Why You Simply Must Have a Date Table [Video]
As a developer, one of the things I can no longer live without is a date table. Who wants to type DATENAME and DATEPART over and over again? Not this guy, and once you have a date table, you won’t want...
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SQL Server Tasks You Probably Shouldn’t Automate
Every now and then I run across an automated script that does something a little suspicious. I’m not saying you should never put these things into a script, but if you do, seriously think about the...
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Did You Give SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition Enough Memory?
Who needs disk when you have memory? It’s a bummer that SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition only allows you 64GB of memory. And it’s good news that the limit goes up to 128GB of memory in SQL Server 2014....
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What Is Commodity Hardware?
You may have heard the term “commodity hardware” thrown around when describing solutions like Redis, Elasticsearch, or kCura’s new Data Grid. Commodity hardware refers to cheap, standardized servers...
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Rebuild or Reorganize? How to Set Up Index Maintenance in SQL Server (video)
Index maintenance is confusing. Should you use maintenance plans or customized SQL Agent jobs? Join Kendra to learn the difference between index ‘rebuild’ and ‘reorganize’ commands, and how to avoid...
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The Most Confusing Words, Phrases, and Acronyms in SQL Server
Words are hard. Acronyms are even harder. Here’s the words that give me the most trouble when talking to people about SQL Server. And thanks to all my Twitter friends quoted here for their suggestions!...
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