This is my third in a series of checklists that I am putting together for a new book designed for DBAs to help audit their SQL Server instances. Previously I blogged about my SQL Server Hardware Checklist and my SQL Server Operating System Checklist. The goal of this checklist… Read more

We had an unexpected switch last weekend. My boss decided that we were ready to move from the Stack Exchange (SE) to an alternative, OSQA.net, without informing any of the people that work on the site. Needless to say this wasn’t a seamless transition, but it was fairly smooth. The… Read more

The following queries look extremely innocent. However, they are all application killers once the target table grows to more than a couple thousand rows:

Select Count(*) From Person_Data Where Upper(Name_Last) = ‘SMITH’

Select Avg(Collar_Size) From Person_Data Where dbo.MyFunc(Person_Data_ID) > 500

For each of these statements, a table scan will be… Read more

After 10 Years, a Move Closer to School and Work
Wow, how moving house interrupts life. I can appreciate we have not had to move about more frequently! Background: Starting at the beginning of May, a month prior to moving, my sage wife Victoria insisted we start the packing… Read more

It’s been a busy month for me for PASS activities. I spent almost the entire week last week on PASS related items and probably 60+ hours for the month:

• Reviewing the annual budget
• A call on SQLSaturday to work on plans for 2011
• Tons of time on the Spring Event

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Thanks to the outstanding efforts of Tim Edwards (twitter | blog), our fearless leader, and the rest of the crew, the PASS Performance Virtual Chapter is rolling and we've started to make ourselves known through various on-line media. It gives me great pleasure to pass on that we're having… Read more

Moore’s Law tells us that CPU’s get a LOT faster over time.  Unfortunately for the database professional, all of the secondary elements of our databases DO NOT get a lot faster over time.  Overall, the main methods of storing data since the 1960’s, magnetic tape and hard disks, have improved… Read more

This is a little bit off topic for me but on Friday I was asked to look at a DB2 instance and sort out some issues with the CPU maxing out. Make no mistake I’m no DB2 expert, but I have done some small pieces of work on it previously,… Read more

One of my back burner projects is to setup a local user group.  I'm delighted to now say that this is up and running.  Over the next few months, I hope to provide some great quality sessions and also provide some ‘virgin’ speakers, myself included, with an environment to practice.  If… Read more

“...And the world is filled with people who can't go to high school, never mind college, and who certainly can't spend their time focused on whether or not they get the good parking space at work.

And so, the obligation: don't settle.
To have all these advantages, all this momentum,…

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I’m not a big networking person. I know that it’s good for my career, but I’ve been lucky enough to get myself fairly well known, my picture is on daily emails from SQLServerCentral, and so a lot of people know of me. As a result, I don’t have to… Read more

OK, are you ready to start the MDX journey.  In MDX Puzzle #1 posting I presented you with the challenge of writing an MDX query based on the requirements that I outlined in that posting.  In this solution and all subsequent solutions I will walk you through the process of… Read more

It’s as simple as that. If you don’t specify ORDER BY, then the order of your result set is not guaranteed. Oh sure , there may be situations where the data looks like it is being returned ordered, but this is not really the case. So, for example :

CREATE…

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Update: Based on Bill Ramos’ comment below and a note on Twitter (thanks!!) I have added some more details which hopefully make the situation clearer.

Summary

When setting up data collection using the GUI, configuration failed halfway through setup. At the point  of failure I… Read more

“Content is king” is the golden rule of the SEO. The semantic web is all about data.  Any web or traditional application has no value without data. Few people have discussed the future of Data, Pat Halland being one of the most prolific ones. Data is and will be everything: Read more

In working on applications at client sites you tend to come across code that makes you think "what were they thinking"? This week I found one that just made me do the "facepalm": select top 1 @_StateTrueKey = OverEngineeredKey from OverEngineered where...(read more)

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I’ve had the opportunity this week to take class with Don Jones (blog | twitter), PowerShell guru and author of PowerShell 2.0 TFM (makes me laugh, each and every time). I’m not even going to attempt to try to teach you some of the amazing information Don has… Read more

Whilst perusing the forums over at SQL Server Central today I stumbled across an interesting question regarding how to identify how much memory is being used by SQL Server on a per database level.

As you know SQL Server stores database data and index pages in memory in an area… Read more

It has been awhile since my last post mainly because I was on a working vacation in northern New England with limited internet access, but also because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. 

Working Vacation

You may be wondering how a technical professional can have a working… Read more

It is generally recommended that 'lock pages in memory' be enabled for your SQL Servers to prevent the OS paging out SQL Server memory.

how do you do this?

Well, the answer is straight forward...If you have SQL Server Enterprise Edition:

You allocate the service account running SQL Server the… Read more