Ding Level 3 in My Epic Life Quest
Wahooo! Today is a day to celebrate. I just realized that I have achieved level 3 in my Epic Life Quest. Stay tuned as I work my way to level 4. I plan to include being a Microsoft Certified Solutions…
Do we care about development environment performance?
Recently, but not for the first time, I was confronted with a server administrator that didn’t want to allocate more than one vCPU to a SQL Server machine in a development environment. His exact words ring over and over in my…
Adding Your Entire Enterprise into Red-Gate SQL Multi Script Distribution List
RedGate sells a product call SQL Multi Script. The product allows you to asynchronously execute T-SQL scripts to large quantities of servers. There are a number of useful administrative tasks which can be made easier with this product. One task,…
Discovering Symantec NetBackup
I have worked with a large organization (150,000+ employees). This organization has a central location and hundreds of subordinate sites. Headquarters (HQ) has dictated that the Symantec NetBackup MS SQL Client will be used for all SQL Server backups. Each site has…
Implicit Conversion Mine Field: Blowing SARGability away!
Implicit conversions are convenient. Implicit conversions are EVIL! When talking to professionals about implicit conversions, I’ve heard a few different comments, such as: (a developer) Don’t waste time converting if the engine does it for you. (a DBA) Sure it…
Trace flags every DBA should know about
I have compiled a list of trace flags which I recommend enabling by default on all of you SQL Server instances and ones which are simply, useful. Check out the page and bookmark it for reference as I will be…
Do not use percentage based auto-growth
Having autogrowth enabled on your SQL Server instance is great! Even in IT shops where you diligently right-size your database files (which is a good idea), autogrowth is the perfect emergency feature. It will increase the size of your files, as needed, until…
Fast, light-weight, row counts
Often we need to know the number of records in a table. If you are looking for something very specific, such as the number of non-NULL values in a particular column, learn how to use COUNT() correctly with this post…
Synchronizing Server Objects for Availability Groups
Updated: 9/8/2017 In addition to the release based method demonstrated below. I created a SQL Agent job based method using dbatools here. This method was created in response to a lot of feedback from DBAs like you. Original After we…
It is who you know, or is it?
I have spent a lot of time learning about how to effectively network and the benefits that it can bring to my life and career. What I find interesting, however, is that there is a negative connotation revolving around the good ol’…