DBAs and the ITIL Framework, Part II: Asset Management
See how the ITIL Framework's Asset Management standards make the DBA's job easier. Use the CMDB and DML to keep your data assets under tight control.
The Other Jobs
This week Steve is asking what jobs you might choose if you had the chance, as well as those you enjoyed, or perhaps dreaded.
Azure SQL Elastic Pools and SQL Monitor
Jon Hayman explains the Azure-tailored metrics and alerts in SQL Monitor that track use of the limited compute resources available to an Azure SQL Elastic Pool, and to each of the databases in it.
The Silent Bug I Find in Most Triggers
I don’t have a problem with triggers. They get the job done when you need to implement business logic in a hurry, and you’re not allowed to change the application. As long as you keep the number of statements to a minimum (say, 2-3), and don’t try to do something really slow like fire up a cursor, triggers can be an efficient way to solve hard problems quickly. However, most triggers I run across have a really, really dangerous bug.
A Self-Serve System to Refresh Databases (Part 3)
This is the wrap up of this series on a system for developers to restore production database in test. It gets pretty detailed on the web setup side.
Overview of Azure Cosmos DB
Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s highly scalable, NoSQL database platform running in Azure. It supports four API models, including Key-Value pair and Documents. Pushpa Sekhara provides an overview of Cosmos DB, including some best practices to improve performance.
Microsoft and Minecraft and Training Kids
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren, looking at learning.
Types of SQL Server Temporary Tables
In this series of tips we will look at different ways using temporary data in SQL Server along with examples. In this first part we will cover some reasons for doing this and different types of temporary data stores.
Where Do You End Up as a DBA?
Steve Jones talks about careers, and where you might take your career over time.
Blogs
How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
The Notification Trap: How Input Fatigue Is Killing Deep Work in Tech
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
Designing a Storage Load Test for SQL Server
I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both...
Forums
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL...
Half of All Engineers
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Half of All Engineers
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers