Things Go South

Recently I was troubleshooting a piece of software that archives data out of a very active import table. It is a pretty simple app. It queries the table for any id’s that have data older than X days. It then queries the table again to pull the… Read more

If you have been following my trials with working with C# and files you know it hasn’t been a bed of roses. I ran into a roadblock when I was trying to build a high performance file copy tool in the CLR. I eventually found a solution. It works… Read more

Continuing the SQLDIY monitoring project we will take a look at tracking blocking events. I actually received a request to update this from a script I had made available at SQLServerCentral. This was a script from the grand old days of SQL Server 2000 and actually used xp_smtp_sendmail That Gert Drapers wrote… Read more

It’s official, I’ll be speaking at SQLSaturday #63 April 2nd. It is something near and dear to my heart, solid state storage. If you have seen me speak recently at any of the other SQLSaturdays you know I love talking about I/O. This time around I’ll be focusing on one… Read more

A Thousand Men Marching Still Only March As Fast As One Man.

la·ten·cy - Computers . the time required to locate the first bit or character in a storage location, expressed as access timeminus word time.

Often when talking to people about performance they get rapped around the MB/Sec number… Read more

As an old school DBA and always having cheap frugal employers, I have rolled my own management and monitoring solutions. I’ve shared bits and pieces of it over the years to colleagues and to the community but never the whole thing at one go. I did try and build a… Read more

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." -  Mark Twain

I try and keep this quote in my mind whenever I’m teaching about new technologies. You often hear the same things parroted over and over again… Read more

Another year and staring it off right! I’ll be speaking at SQLSaturday in Houston, TX on the fundamentals of storage and SQL Server. I love this talk. I give it regularly and it’s like an old friend to me. Near and dear to my heart, IO subsystems and SQL Server… Read more

We are in the final stages of selecting the speakers for the SQLRally May 11th through the 13th in sunny Orlando Florida. The program selection is a little different than what we have done with the Summit. The committee narrowed the number of selections and is putting the… Read more

My friend, and newly minted MVP, Jen McCown (blog|twitter) is hosting  T-SQL Tuesday this month. I normally don’t do the T-SQL Tuesday, but this is a post about resolutions so I am resolving to do more of them in the new year. I’ve always considered myself… Read more

You heard right, I’ve finished with the 1.0 release. It isn’t pretty but it works. If you need a primer check out my last post. If you need a list just fill out the form and I’ll get you taken care of.

Lets take a look at the features:

• Create…

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I’ve been pretty quite since the PASS Summit and with good reason. Every year we have a chapter leader meeting. Every year, there is a laundry list of things that chapters would like PASS HQ to do for them. Time and again I’ve watched other people in the community step… Read more

Fusion-io has announced general availability of the new Octal. This card is the largest single flash based device I’ve ever seen. The SLC version has 2.56 terabytes of raw storage and the MLC has a whopping 5.12 terabytes of raw storage.  This thing is a behemoth. The throughput numbers are… Read more

I recently wrote about solid state storage and its different form factor. Well, several major manufacturers have realized that solid state needs all the bandwidth it can get. Dell, IBM, EMC, Fujitsu and Intel have formed the SSD Form Factor Working Group bringing PCIe 3 to the same form factor… Read more

I recently had the privilege to talk with David Flynn, former CTO, Founder and newly minted CEO about Fusion-io. How Fusion-io was born. What they have built and the future of the company. Fusion-io is a new comer to the enterprise storage space and has exited the gates in… Read more

Solid state storage has come on strong in the last year. With that explosion of new products it can be hard to look at all the vendor information and decide which device is best for you. Between the different manufacturers using different methods to benchmark their products showing two different… Read more

Solid state storage has come on strong in the last year. With that explosion of new products it can be hard to look at all the vendor information and decide which device is best for you. Between the different manufacturers using different methods to benchmark their products showing two different… Read more

Solid state storage is the new kid on the block. We see new press releases every day about just how awesome this new technology is. Like with any technology, you need a solid foundation in how it works before you can decide if it is right for you. Lets review… Read more

Not being one for letting a problem get the best of me, I took another look at the asynchronous overlapped IO problem. If you read my last post on the subject, you know I’ve done a lot of work on this already. None of the things I said last time… Read more

Ever since the upgrade from SQL Server 6.5 to 7.0 one of the most requested features I’ve heard people complain about loosing was the ability to backup a single table. During my tenure as Product Manager for Quest’s SQL Litespeed extracting tables was one of the things we were constantly… Read more