September, 2009

I teach a college course at the University of Washington, and as part of the class I include a series on creating a using an Entity Relationship Diagram, or ERD. An ERD, as I’m sure most of you know, is a series of box and connector shapes that explain...

Paul Randal, he of SQLskills.com fame, has published a new whitepaper on High Availability with SQL Server. If you follow any SQL Server news or blog sites, you’ve probably already see the announcement for it, but I wanted to mention it here in case you...

You probably heard me say (along with a lot of other folks) that you need a good recovery strategy, not just a good backup strategy. The thought here is that you’re not backing up for it’s own sake, you’re taking the backup in case you need to restore...

“I don't feel old. I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.” - Bob Hope I hear you, Bob. I hear you.

SQL Server allows you to set a “bottom” and “top” range for memory that the Instance will use. The memory will dynamically expand and contract based on Instance need and system pressure. But this flexibility and ease of configuration can (not always,...

I do a lot of performance analysis on SQL Server Instances, and I normally start with a series of Performance Counters from both Windows and SQL Server. This gives me the ability to limit what I need to look at by seeing which Hardware and Windows components...

I’ll be speaking at two of the “SQL Saturday” Events in the next month. The first is here in my own back-yard, in Redmond, Washington. I’ll be demonstrating the Resource Governor with simple, easy-to-follow examples, and I’ll even show you how to monitor...

In the past couple of weeks I’ve posted some articles on how to tune a Windows system for SQL Server. Microsoft SQL Server DBA’s are a bit different than a DBA on, say, a mainframe, because we also have to know the operating system we run on pretty well...

I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, and I’ve found that I agree with this assessment of learning styles: “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric...

One of my favorite ways to learn is through examples. If you’ll explain what something does and a little of how it works,and then give me an example to decompose, I usually come up to speed pretty quickly. I’ve been carrying a DVD (and CD’s before that...

In a previous blog entry , I mentioned you could import a Windows Perfmon log into SQL Server Profiler. I received a note that someone was having a problem doing this, and when we looked over his situation, it turned out that he was using a Windows Perfmon...

Well, I’m flying today - down to Arizona to film at the SQL Server Worldwide User Group (SSWUG) online conference I mentioned a while back. And I got special permission to pass this discount code along to my blog readers, so if you want to attend the...

In SQL Server 2005 a great new feature was introduced into SQL Server Profiler – the ability to import Perfmon data. If you’re not familiar with one or both of those tools, SQL Server Profiler is a package included with SQL Server that can “watch” your...

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” - Albert Einstein

I got this comment from the post yesterday: “ It's just as easy to use gigabit instead 10/100. Further, where is this administration being done? Most likely there is some other pipe that will have to be shared between any amount of connections. And at...

Many people aren’t aware of how important the Network Interface Card (NIC) in their system really is. If you picture your database as a warehouse, the NIC devices are the doors and bays where stuff comes in and out. Imagine if you had one door, and everyone...

Money is tight – we all know that. One of the first places that companies cut in the budget is training. So what do you do if your boss won’t let you go anywhere? You do have options. You can train on your own, or ask them to buy you books. But one of...

I was doing a presentation recently and was asked about the image I use as my background on my desktop. I’m happy to share it! Click below for the full size:

A lesson learned “the hard way” is not soon forgotten: “A man who tries to carry a cat home by its tail will learn a lesson that can be learned in no other way.” - Mark Twain

Have you ever seen one of us “Softies” (Microsoft Professionals) at a conference, briefing or on Mount Rainier on a motorcycle and said “You work for Microsoft? I need your help on fixing….”? Perhaps you heard back from that person, or perhaps you lost...

OK, I don't think that's even a word, but the synonyms (can a non-word have a synonym?) are code beautifiers, sql formatters, etc. The basic idea is that it's a program that re-formats the text in a Transact-SQL statement using a standard set of rules...

I've been in some classes recently and one of the lessons we learned about communication was: "don't guess". As technical professionals, we often think we know the answer to the problem someone is describing about halfway through the person's description...