With all of the high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) features, the database administrator must understand how much data loss and downtime is possible under the worst case scenarios. Data loss affects your ability to meet recovery point objectives (RPO)…
By the time this post is published I will likely be pulling into the parking lot at the Subway World Headquarters, ready to receive my employee badge. My time with Ascension Information Services, and possibly healthcare IT, has come to…
I recently performed a side-by-side upgrade of a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance to SQL Server 2016 RTM. This particular instance had over 200 SQL Agent jobs running various PowerShell scripts. After the upgrade I had to modify nearly all…
On many occasions I have found myself installing SQL Server and/or its development tools for a non-DBA power user. It always frustrated me to do this because I feel that SQL Server is for advanced users and I would expect…
SARGability is the ability of the query to properly search the arguments that you pass it. When your query is not sargable you cannot properly use your available indexes. A few months ago I wrote about sargability in detail. Today I want…
This year was the first time I submitted to speak at the PASS Summit. Like many first time candidates, I was not selected to speak this year. The experience was valuable, however. I put more effort into writing this abstract than…
In the last post of this blog series, I discussed what a heap is and how it impacts query performance. In this post, I will describe clustered indexes and how they differ from a heap. They are indexes but also…
The other day I came across the need to compare two different paths for equality. The most annoying part of this task is when the paths are directories and you need to worry about the trailing slash. PowerShell provides a…
SQL Server 2016’s Query Store feature is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting new features for this version. The Query Store will keep track of current and past query execution plans which grants you deeper insights into the performance…
In the last post of this blog series, I discussed what a B-Tree index was and briefly explained its history. Before we dive into the indexes which SQL Server uses, it is important to set the foundation of data structures. The…