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[Video] Office Hours 2016/10/05 (With Transcriptions)
This week, Brent, Richie, Tara, and Erik discuss their learning styles, Always On Availability Groups, memory leaks, Windows updates, how to transition from developer to DBA, upgrading SQL server from...
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Set Statistics… Profile?
Forgotten, But Not Gone Two of the best built-in tools to figure out if your query tuning efforts are headed in the right direction are SET STATISTICS TIME ON and SET STATISTICS IO ON. If you’re really...
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Why I Love kCura RelativityOne Even Though I Don’t Use It
At RelativityFest this week, kCura showed more details about how their upcoming software-as-a-service hosted in Microsoft Azure works. I really like where they’re going with it. Presenting at...
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The Problem with Windows Server 2016 Licensing
Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide (PDF) Windows Server 2016 is now licensed by the core, but that’s not really the big problem. The bigger problem is buried in the licensing guide (PDF): “A minimum...
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Questions You Should Be Asking About Your Backups
#basicbackup So you’re taking backups! That’s great. Lots of people aren’t, and that’s not so great. Lots of people think they are, but haven’t bothered to see if the jobs are succeeding, or if their...
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Updated First Responder Kit: sp_Blitz markdown output, sp_BlitzIndex...
In addition to lots of bug fixes and tweaks, my favorite option is: sp_Blitz @OutputType = ‘markdown’ sp_Blitz @OutputType = ‘markdown’ See, recently I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Stack questions...
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[Video] Office Hours 2016/10/12 (With Transcriptions)
This week, Brent, Richie, and Erik discuss estimating compression savings, disabling triggers, suggestions to first-time Pass Summit attendees, tools for database version control, transitioning from...
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Searching Strings in SQL Server is Expensive
In the classic spirit of my How to Think Like the Engine class, let’s go take a look at the StackOverflow.Users table and find all the users named Brent. There’s a DisplayName field, and I’m going to...
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PasteThePlan Update: See the Most Recently Pasted Plans
Just another terrifying query PasteThePlan.com lets you paste in execution plans and get a link to share them with other people. In our company chat room, we get an alert whenever a new plan comes in,...
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MAX Data Types Do WHAT?
Users are horrible, I know You can just never rely on them to pass in reasonable search strings. When you write stored procedures to retrieve information for them, it’s really tempting to define all...
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Thoughts About the #SQLSummit Day 1 Keynote
Quentin Clark I’ll be honest, dear reader: I usually hate the holy hell out of the Summit day 1 keynote. As an example, check out the last keynote I liveblogged – go to the bottom and then read up....
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[Video] Office Hours 2016/10/19 (With Transcriptions)
This week, Brent (and only Brent) answers your questions about table partitioning, best practices for VMware configuration, rebuilding indexes, transitioning from physical SQL failover cluster to...
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First Responder Kit Update: sp_BlitzCache Catches Cursors, Scalar Functions,...
Every time we take on a client for our SQL Critical Care®, the very first thing we do is run the First Responder Kit scripts: sp_Blitz to get a health check, sp_BlitzFirst to check their wait stats,...
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Announcing our 2017 SQL Server Training Scholarship Winners
We’re serious about the heart thing. Right now, all over the world, people are using SQL Server to make the world a better place. Sadly, most of these teams are underfunded, understaffed, and...
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My How to Think Like the Engine Class is Now Free – and Open Source
You’re a developer or a DBA, and you’re comfortable writing queries to get the data you need. You’re much less comfortable trying to design the right indexes for your database server. You’ve never had...
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Silent Demo: The Plan Cache
Shhh, and pay close attention. In 76 seconds, I’ll teach you something intriguing about the way SQL Server caches execution plans: Psst - How to Think Like the Engine is now free.
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Why You Should Test Your Queries Against Bigger Data
I Like Testing Things Especially Brent’s patience. And I like watching people test things. SQL Server is sort of perfect for that. You make some changes, you hit f5, and you wait for something to...
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Reminder: Rate Your Summit Sessions (and Watch Mine Now!)
PASS Summit attendees, we need your feedback. The greatest gift you can give back to your volunteer speakers is your comments to help them get better. Ratings are good – but what we really like is...
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Lessons Learned From Working in the Clouds
Recently, we released PasteThePlan.com, which runs on top of Amazon Web Services. PasteThePlan.com allows you to share SQL Server query plans with others. Behind the scenes, we’re using DynamoDB (a...
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A Gentle Reminder That Corruption Stinks
Seriously DBCC CHECKDB (YourDatabaseHere) WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; Oh. It’s broken. Brent says: normally, we don’t post client screenshots on the blog because it’s hard to sanitize the...
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