Dryer Lint
When I was in the U.S. Navy, the sailors had a lot of social challenges since we had 200 grumpy men all sharing the same facilities for several months at a time. It should not be surprising that the laundry…
Ding Level 4 in My Epic Life Quest
I am extremely excited to announce that I have achieved level 4 in My Epic Life Quest! Over the last year I had been reminding myself about my own epic life quest. I felt like I had drifted from my…
DBCC CLONEDATABASE
Often I hear developers claim that they need production data in order to properly tune their queries. There are a couple of reasons that they believe this. The most important one is likely because the execution plans generated in a…
Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools
Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools are a mechanism for grouping your Azure SQL Databases together into a shared resource pool. Imagine for a moment that you had a physical server on premise. On that server, you have a single SQL…
My SQL Cruise Diary
It has been three years since I first heard of SQL Cruise from Grant Fritchey (b | t). At the time, I was working for a large tax preparation company. They would not allow me to attend any conference during…
Connecting your Azure regions
In this post, I am going to demonstrate how to configure virtual network gateways in Azure using Resource Manager. This is important for connecting two Azure regions together, enabling you to setup high-availability and/or disaster recovery systems. 1. Resource Groups…
How Fast Can You Learn?
Self-analysis and emotional intelligence are valuable assets. Internal, or even external, dialog aids in problem solving and understanding. Knowing yourself is more important than any skill that you may have. You must understand what you think you know, what you know for certain,…
T-SQL Tuesday #85: STOP! Restore Time!
I know, I know. That was a bit much. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Kenneth Fisher (b | t). T-SQL Tuesday (#TSQL2sDAY) is a blog party founded by Adam Machanic (b | t). Each month a member…
Rotating Tables with Indicators in SSRS 2016
When creating SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) dashboards, I like to use indicators to give clear and colorful data visualizations. In this post I am going to cover the use of indicators and demonstrate how to rotate your tables so that…
DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF: Spoofing production hardware
Performance tuning in a development environment can be difficult. Processor core count and memory are important factors in execution plan generation. The undocumented command DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF will alter the optimizer’s perception of its server resources. Syntax You can use the DBCC…