Fun with dates
Every year me and a group of friends attend the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) at RAF Fairford, for us it is a long weekend where we camp close to the airfield and get to take in three full days...
View ArticleCost Threshold for Parallelism
Parallelism, where to start? Well let’s start right at the beginning shall we with the question, what is parallelism? Simply put it is a feature of SQL Server which allows queries to utilize more...
View ArticleIndex Tuning
This week I've been carrying out some performance tuning of some of the more intensive procedures in one of our environments. Using SQL Sentry Performance Advisor I highlighted four or five procedures...
View ArticleSQL Server Hardware and Acronyms
Over the weekend I finished reading yet another Red Gate book, this one was SQL Server Hardware by Glenn Berry (t - b). Having earned my crust as a Windows Engineer before honing my SQL Server Skills...
View ArticleDTA and Hypothetical Indexes
For those of you that don’t know DTA stands for Database Engine Tuning Adviser and is available from the Tools menu in Management Studio. This tool was first introduced in SQL Server 2005 and has been...
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Object Qualification
I came across an interesting issue recently with NHibernate, now it is widely known I despise ORM’s, in my experience they do a pretty mediocre job at best and at times can be absolutely horrific. The...
View ArticleDedicated Administrator Connection (DAC)
We all dread the scenario whereby SQL Server is under so much load and has a complete lack of resources that no further connections can be made. Although extreme and a situation I have never been in...
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Baseline SQL Server with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
Baselines can be any set of metrics that have been recorded to give you an understanding of what is the norm. Having a baseline gives you another piece to the puzzle when troubleshooting performance...
View ArticleFirst Time Speaker
So this week was another first for me, I finally bit the bullet and gave a talk at the Leeds SQL Server User Group and it was great, I thoroughly enjoyed it!Public speaking is something that I have...
View ArticleDisaster Recovery - Part 1 - Possibly Almost Everything But the Kit
Over the years I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending on who you are to have experienced several disasters along with a couple of very near misses. In this post I am going to explore...
View ArticleDatabase Tables
Today I was asked for "a list of all tables in all databases" on a particular instance of SQL Server. Knowing what was actually required was all "User" tables in all "Accessible" "User" databases I...
View ArticleCost Savings and Backup Compression
Let me set the scene, one of our internal IT SQL Servers which stores a whole host of performance metrics has over the last few months’ experienced tremendous growth as we have started to monitor more...
View ArticleHigh Availability Lingo
You have got to love the way the SQL Server team change the lingo in all of their high availability (HA) / disaster recovery (DR) features. To a novice and even to more seasoned DBA’s it can be...
View Articletablediff Utility
I recently stumbled across a little gem of a utility called tablediff. I have been working a lot with replication in my current position and recently had to setup merge replication between 3 servers...
View ArticleCreate Database Script
I always try to enforce standards across all the SQL Servers I manage, it makes tons of administrative tasks much easier to complete and ensures consistency across the estate. One thing that really...
View ArticleDatabase Mirroring Error
I have been setting up multi instance database mirroring for the last couple of days along with some other DR related processes. I will do a detailed post about these at a later date. I came across...
View ArticleDatabase Mirroring Performance Counters
This week’s SQL Skills insider email contains a simple but often too true scenario regarding database mirroring. If you haven’t signed up to the insider email I suggest you do as there is wealth of...
View ArticleUnused Indexes
A sound indexing strategy is paramount to performance in an OLTP system. Not having the correct indexes in place can cause unnecessary reads placing additional overhead on, among other things the IO...
View ArticleTables without a Clustered Index
Yesterday while adding some new logic to an existing process I noticed an unacceptable level of performance degradation with the routine. Investigation led me to find that a new table had slipped...
View ArticleTables without a Primary Key
As well as creating the script for yesterday’s post on finding Tables without a Clustered Index I tweaked the script slightly to get all tables without a primary key. A Primary Key constraint enforces...
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