Demo God Recovery Kit
I was scheduled to give a virtual presentation to the MagicPASS user group. The week before I received a beta update for Windows 10. My computer became very unstable. It would not boot half of the time and it corrupted…
Non-Clustered Indexes in SQL Server
In the last post of this blog series, I discussed what a clustered index is and how to choose an ideal clustered index key. In this post, I will describe the non-clustered index and offer design tips as they relate…
Measuring Availability Group Synchronization Lag
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)…
Choosing Subway
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…
SQL Agent 2016 Jobs Running PowerShell Scripts
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…
SQL Server 2016 Basic Installer
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…
A better way to search dates
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…
My PASS Summit 2016 Submission
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…
Clustered Indexes in SQL Server
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…
Compare paths with PowerShell
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…