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How to Get Your Very First Full Time DBA Job
It’s about time. Step 1: get a job as a developer or a sysadmin. Step 2: stand near the database. Step 3: wait. Almost every DBA I know got their start this way. Sooner or later, something went wrong...
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What Is a Staging Environment and How Do You Build One?
If you’re a full time production database administrator, you need a staging environment. This is where you test infrastructure tasks like failing over mirroring, doing a disaster recovery role swap,...
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It’s Now Easier to Query sp_AskBrent’s Historical Tables
When you want to know why the server’s slow, you can ask Brent. sp_AskBrent® checks a lot of DMVs to find common causes of server slowness. When you turn on @ExpertMode = 1, you can see additional...
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[Video] Office Hours 2016/01/20
In this week’s Office Hours Q&A, the entire team avoids spinlocks, then discusses the new Cardinality Estimator, the virtual inserted/deleted tables, monitoring tools, restoring single tables, DBA...
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[Video] Free Training of the Week: Joins in Execution Plans
This year, we’re trying something new: every Monday, we’re going to show you one module out of our online training classes. It’s the whole module, not a sneak peek, and it’s available the whole week....
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Another reason why scalar functions in computed columns is a bad idea
As if there weren’t enough reasons In my last blog post I talked about different things that cause plans, or zones of plans, to execute serially. One of the items I covered was computed columns that...
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SQL Server Agent is an application server.
Application server. SQL Server Agent is a job scheduler. When we first get started managing SQL Server, we usually use it for backups, index maintenance, DBCC CHECKDB, and other common maintenance...
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Should I Worry About Index Fragmentation?
Here’s a handy flowchart for whenever you find yourself worrying about fragmentation: *Talk to your doctor about whether fragmentation is a problem for you. Seek help for index maintenance lasting...
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[Video] Office Hours 2016/01/27
In this week’s Office Hours Q&A, we talk about the pains of patching lots of SQL Servers, how to move databases from one drive to another with minimal downtime, the difference between NOLOCK and...
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[Video] Free Training of the Week: How to Configure Quorum for SQL Server
This year, we’re trying something new: every Monday, we’re going to show you one module out of our online training classes. It’s the whole module, not a sneak peek, and it’s available the whole week....
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Introducing Our Latest Employee, Richie Rump (aka @Jorriss)
Richie Rump, aka @Jorriss During our very first training class, we showed the students how we use SET STATISTICS IO ON to get the number of logical reads performed on each table in a query, and then...
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A funny thing happened on my way to set up Mirroring…
I’ve set up Mirroring about a billion times I’m not bragging about that. I’d rather say that I set up a billion AGs, and not one of them ever failed. But then I’d be lying to you; those things fail...
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When Shrinking Tempdb Just Won’t Shrink
I am not a proponent of shrinking databases, but sometimes you have to because your momma said to. Sometimes that database is tempdb. It used to be that we were warned against shrinking tempdb because...
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New York City: The Data That Never Sleeps
I love living in the city Blog posts about people’s favorite data sets seem to be popular these days, so I’m throwing my hat in the ring. NYC has been collecting all sorts of data from all sorts of...
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[Video] Office Hours 2016/02/03
In this week’s Office Hours Q&A, Erik, Tara, Doug, and the new guy Richie Rump answer fast-paced questions about logging Perfmon counters to a table, Standard Edition’s 4-socket licensing limit,...
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[Video] Free Training of the Week: 70 DBA Technical Interview Questions
This year, we’re trying something new: every Monday, we’re going to show you one module out of our online training classes. It’s the whole module, not a sneak peek, and it’s available the whole week....
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Stored Procedure Cached Time vs SQL Statement Cached Time
I recently ran into a performance problem that had me scratching my head. How could a stored procedure’s plan have changed, and yet it not be reflected in sys.dm_exec_procedure_stats? So here’s what...
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No but really, how big should my log file be?
Most of you are going to hate this And TL;DR, there’s a script at the end of the post. But like The Monster At The End Of This Book, it’s worth it not to skip the middle. There are about a billion...
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The Top 4 Job Tasks DBAs Forget
It’s easy to get caught up in daily incidents, tickets, and special projects. Like a good scout, though, a core task in a DBA’s job is to be prepared. You have to set time aside in your schedule to: 1....
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[Video] Office Hours 2016/02/10
In this week’s Office Hours Q&A, the whole team shows up – but Doug is the invisible man. We answer questions about hot-add CPU and memory, whether to sync jobs across Availability Group replicas,...
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