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Faster queries using narrow indexes and CROSS APPLY
It’s common to try to build the perfect index for a query. This index only uses the exact right columns for the key columns and other, presentational, data is pushed to the INCLUDE section of the...
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New sp_AskBrent® Reports on Waits, Files, Perfmon Since Startup
When your SQL Server is slow right now, you can run sp_AskBrent® to find out what’s going on. It checks for things like long-running queries, backups, blocking, files growing, and will tell you the top...
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PASS Summit #FreeCon2015: What We’re Talking About
FreeCon SQLSaturday Chicago 2012 On the Monday before the PASS Summit in Seattle this year, we’re putting on another one of our FreeCons. The FreeCon is different from a typical conference pre-con –...
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Announcing the Dell DBA Days: August 25-28
If you want to work on the cutting edge, you can’t just read best practices – you have to go create them. Somebody’s gotta teach you how to use SQL Server 2016, right? We asked Dell if we could fly out...
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Indexing for Windowing Functions
Hooray Windowing Functions They do stuff that used to be hard to do, or took weird self-joins or correlated sub-queries with triangular joins to accomplish. That’s when there’s a standalone inequality...
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The Nine Circles of Developer Hell
Commit message: Duck! Everyone’s code is terrible. But exactly how terrible is yours? First Circle: Code Limbo We can’t say this is good code, but for the most part nobody notices it. Second Circle:...
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New Updates for sp_Blitz®, sp_BlitzCache™
We’ve just updated our First Responder Kit to include new versions of these tools: sp_Blitz® v41 – June 18, 2015: Added check 162 for CMEMTHREAD waits on servers with >= 8 logical processors per...
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How Do You Manage DBAs? Part 1: Measuring Backups
When the DBA reports to you, ask yourself two questions: “What would I fire the DBA for?” “How can I prove that they’re not doing that?” There’s a lot of possible answers to #1, many of which involve...
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Save 50% ($149.50) On Our New High Availability and Disaster Recovery Course...
It’s your fault if the SQL Server goes down. You don’t build a lot of clusters or AGs, and you aren’t confident that your SQL Servers will survive a patching problem, a SAN outage, or a corruption...
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New SQL Server Management Studio 2015/June – with Check for Updates!
This morning, Microsoft announced a new standalone SQL Server Management Studio download: This is our first effort to release SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in a mechanism outside of the SQL...
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New Quiz! SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Think you know everything there is to know about high availability and disaster recovery? Head on over to our new free quiz to find out! Take the SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery...
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How to Configure AlwaysOn AG Backups with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts
With SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can offload backups to a replica rather than running them on the primary. Here’s how to do it: 1. Install Ola Hallengren’s utility scripts on all of...
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Why Zero Data Loss in SQL Server is Harder Than You Think
But Kendra, it can’t be that hard… after all, we have synchronous modes in Database Mirroring and Availability Groups, right? Synchronous Commit doesn’t mean “zero data loss” When we think about...
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Should You Put Things in the master Database?
Growing up as a young boy, my elementary teachers always warned me about the perils of putting stuff in master. But what’s the real deal? Why is this such a bad idea? System databases are often located...
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Indexing for GROUP BY
it’s not glamorous And on your list of things that aren’t going fast enough, it’s probably pretty low. But you can get some pretty dramatic gains from indexes that cover columns you’re performing...
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The Fastest Way to Reconfigure a Bunch of Servers
… is to use a SQL Server where a robot does it for you! I stole that from Kendra – someone else already wrote the sentence for me and why not keep re-using things, right? Configuring SQL Servers the...
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Replication Won’t Refresh Your Dev and Pre-Production Environments
It’s almost like the real thing, except it’s totally different. At first glance, SQL Server’s transactional replication seems like it’s useful for moving data around in all sorts of situations: it...
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An Update to SQL Server Management Studio is Available
That’s the message you get in your tray if you open SSMS 2016 today: SSMS Update Available Then click Tools, Check for Updates, and you get: Check for Updates What’s awesome is that I didn’t even...
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Want us to run training classes at your office?
You’re working with SQL Server, and you really want to learn how to make it faster and more reliable, but your boss just won’t let you go off to our upcoming training classes. Good news – we’ll bring...
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Three Easy Tweaks to Tune Up Your SQL Server
I’ve been doing SQL Critical Care® work with clients for over a year now. It’s absolutely true that every client’s situation is different and needs special attention. However, I’ve found that there’s a...
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