You can read the full text of it in today’s SSC Newsletter, the quick summary is that for many businesses a database is a toaster. They don’t care how it works, they don’t want to do anything to it, they just want it to work. If it breaks they fix it or call someone. Give it a read and see what you think.
I’m slated to write one a month and I haven’t settled on a theme yet, and don’t know if I will. More likely I’ll look for ideas as I’m out with groups and look for things that intrigue me, not much different than how I find blog ideas. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
It’s also funny how you can so easily add one more thing to your task list. Writing one editorial a month doesn’t seem like a lot, even writing twelve a year. But at an average of an hour each, that’s 12 hours that’s either added to the stack or taken away from something else. Ideally you know the answer to that before you say yes!
Renaming Databases was just published on SSC, another in my lastest effort to expose some of the hidden complexities in seemingly routine operations. Definitely read the discussion thread attached to the article as there were several very good additional tips suggested.
This was actually posted about a week ago, fell behind a little during travelling. Building a Security Philosophy was written to get people to think about they approach security. Do you give the proverbial Junior DBA only partial access? Do you believe in table access? Do you use the built in roles?
I have opinions on the topic, but it's not clear that there are always right answers, and definitely some that are situational. Many of us have the philosophy that we acquired at the first job, or from the first manager or peer - at some point it's worth revisiting to decide if we still agree with those principles held for so long!
Moving Tempdb isn't a common operation, and mercifully a simple one if it comes to that. As in much of the stuff I write about I wanted to put down a nice detailed answer to a pretty simple question. Think you know how it works? What happens to the original tempdb mdf/ldf if you move tempdb? Do they move? Get deleted? Read the article:-)
Rebuilding Stats was published yesterday on SSC, some nice comments posted to it as well. The main point of the article was that if you're rebuilding indexes with the default options you're automatically getting stats update on those columns as well.
It's been a while since I had anything up on SSC, a combination of Steve being in good shape on content and me being busier than usual, but early July I had a break and got 4 articles done. Disabling indexes isn't a complicated option of course, but one of the things I see in classes is that we all tend to use a pretty narrow subset of the available functionality, for better or worse! Articles like this are hopefully ways to expand the set of tools you use, much in the same way you read the word of the day (you do read that don't you?).
Someone asked me for these recently as they predate the blog. All were posted on SSC over the past couple years.
Professional Development
Beginning Professional Development
Time for Training
Snapshots Part 1 covers the basics of doing a snapshot regardless of what type of replication is being used. In Part 2 coming up in the next couple weeks I dig a little more into the underlying process - not critical to know but helps dispel the black box syndrome.
I wrote Management because we typically get it so wrong in our line of work. Nothing better than working for a great manager except working for one that is also a great leader, and perhaps nothing worse than working for a terrible manager. The tragedy of our profession is that too often we take the superstars from the ranks and move them into roles they are not prepared for and perhaps not even suited for, and then do little to nothing to help them succeed.
I have zero disdain for the craft of managing, I think it's a critical component of the business. It's easy to make fun of management, to call it politics, etc, and most of that is well earned humor. But it doesn't have to just be about that. It can also be about building an environment where the alpha geeks can use their skills most effectively, one where you can mentor the junior people into senior people, and where winning is a by product of that environment.
I wrote this article on computed columns to support some of the teaching I do for my beginner to intermediate level performance tuning class. It's not a technique you'll apply that often, but I think it's used less often than perhaps it should be. Hope you'll take a look and add a comment to the article.
As I mentioned yesterday the article I wrote on IT Transparency is finally live today and now the wait to see what the response is! I hope you'll drop me a comment after you read it, either here on the blog or in the SSC forum attached to the article.
Partitioning Part 4 concludes the series with a look at 'real' partitioning in SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition. Overall the series worked out reasonably well, accomplished my goal of introducing the technology and options without getting into dense technical detail. There is definitely more to explore in partioning than I've covered!
Part looks at using views for partitioning, still a valid technique even in the SQL 2005 world. I added in some basic performance tuning information as well, looking at the query plan when partitioning is done correctly vs incorrectly. The final installment has been submitted and will cover the SQL 2005 implementation of partitioning.
This was fun to write, though it's hard to boil everything down to 10 big steps. I thnk as an industry we tend to forget that there are a LOT of us wearing multiple hats, working solo, just trying to get things done - and while we want to do things the right way, there isn't always clear guidance to help is figure it all out. This is a very short attempt at starting to map that out.
I wrote up some more notes (in addition to what's available here on the blog) to try to raise the awareness level of what might be possible for a SQL Server event. Article is at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/User+Groups/61534/.
