I have a database which has several tables that have very heavy write operations. These table are very large and some are over a hundred gigabytes. I noticed performance of this database is getting slower and after some investigation we suspect that the Auto Update Statistics function is causing a performance degradation.
What motivates people? What makes them happy at their jobs? Steve Jones talks about Drive, the book by Dan Pink, and the possibility that people actually like doing their jobs and are willing to work.
I was recently working on a data cleanup problem where I had to do lots of comparisons of one row...
Microsoft SQL Server is a feature rich database management system product, with an enormous number of T-SQL commands. With each feature supporting its own list of commands, it can be difficult to remember them all. MAK shares his top 10 T-SQL statements that a DBA should know.
Did you know that commuting can actually affect your health? Steve Jones talks about an IBM study on this and suggests you talk to your boss about telecommuting or remote work. The option to do so just might be beneficial for your long term health.
There was a conversation on Twitter recently (with the #sqlhelp hashtag) about whether it was completely safe to run the...
On February 18, Franck Delattre released version 1.57 of the very useful CPU-Z Utility. Here is a list of the...
We ran into a case recently where we had the logins and users scripted out on my SQL Server instances, but we didn't have the fixed database roles for a critical database. As a result, our recovery efforts were only partially successful. We ended up trying to figure out what the database role memberships were for that database we recovered but we'd like not to be in that situation again. Is there an easy way to do this?
We have recently found an elegant way to reduce the time, and disk space required for SharePoint administrators who need to perform granular recovery operations out of their SQL Server backup files. I used to get customer calls that would go something like this:
How do you decide what to archive? Steve Jones says that you need to come up with a method as our data sizes grow larger and larger all the time.
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Backing Up a DMK
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Quiet Part
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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