Leadership – Influencing Others A good leader is able to influence others, whether it’s directly or indirectly. Influence is about your ability to have an impact; it’s not about getting exactly what you want. Generally you are...

Release Candidate 0 (RC0) of SQL Server 2012 is available for download! That means you can start to experience a feature complete version of the next great SQL release. :-) We’re still looking at the first half of calendar year 2012 for the RTM...

Leadership – Strengths and Weaknesses As part of my attempt to grow as a leader I took the StrengthsFinder survey. I got this one from the Go Lead Idaho sessions I am attending. It’s based on a Gallup survey and is all based on self...

SQL PASS: All the Magic Knobs – Tools In my All the Magic Knobs talk at #SQLPASS 2011 I discussed some easy ways to determine if you’re using some of the performance magic for SQL Server. When you have many consolidated, non-tier 1 databases...

Leadership – Taking Feedback As you may have seen from my other blogs, I’m taking leadership courses and trying to stretch and define myself. It is hard work but I think it is going to be well worth the trouble. I’m getting great...

Leadership – What Does It Mean? What is a leader? Are you a leader? Do you have to be a people manager to be a leader? Do you care about leadership? These are all questions I’ve faced recently. I’m attending some leadership...

Are You Smarter Than an MCM? I had a great time on Wednesday co-presenting with some great SQL peeps! We dressed up, had a lot of fun, and shared a few technical tips along the way. My demo was on VLFs, an often forgotten and/or misunderstood part...

SQL PASS 2011 DBA-319-C #SQLPASS All the Magic Knobs - Low Effort, High Return Tuning Key points covered: Power Savings = High Performance Smart Virtualization Enough Hardware Control other apps, filter drivers Optimize for ad...

Data Gathering – SQL Server Setup Problems Cindy Gross, Dedicated Support Engineer Gathering the right data during a problem can get you a long ways towards resolving the problem. When you ask the right questions and clearly define the...

SQL PowerShell Demo - Intro Cindy Gross, Dedicated Support Engineer Audience: SQL Server DBAs and/or developers who are familiar with basic SQL Server commands, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and SQL Agent jobs. 0. Prerequisites ...

PowerShell for SQL Server - Basics Cindy Gross, Dedicated Support Engineer Audience: SQL DBAs and/or developers who are familiar with basic SQL Server commands, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and SQL Agent jobs. Basics PowerShell...

PowerShell for SQL - Getting Started Cindy Gross, Dedicated Support Engineer You may want to use PowerShell to automate SQL activities such as backups. There are various ways to automate backups. For example, you can centralize the backup calls...

Using Mount Points with SQL Server Author: Cindy Gross, Dedicated Support Engineer Tech Reviewer: Min He, SQL Cluster PM Summary: Microsoft does NOT support installing or putting databases on the “root” of a mount point in SQL...

  The guest user in SQL Server is a bit of a funny object. While we’re taught to be polite to guests, sometimes we don’t want to invite them into our databases. If you have a login to an instance of SQL Server that doesn’t automatically give you...

Thanks to the Wisconsin Virtual SQL Server User Group for letting me talk about tempdb today! The slides and demo queries are attached. Once the recording is available I will update this blog with a link to it. Taming the Tempdb Tempest Summary...

Many people use sp_cycle_errorlog to rollover to a new SQL error log periodically. Please make sure this is necessary and/or that you are not doing it too frequently. The more often you roll over the log the greater the chance you will not have troubleshooting...

Thanks to everyone who attended my session today! I think the 740 or so of you overloaded the audio. :-) Sorry everything wasn't clear on the voice delivery, hopefully the slides (below) provide enough information for you to know what to download. Then...

I have put together some general guidelines for how you want a server to be delivered to the DBA team for a new SQL Server install. You won't necessarily use all of them, but consider it a starting point for your SQL Server install standards. Places where...

Power Saving Options on SQL Server Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 have settings for “Power Options”. Windows 2008 R2 has additional power improvements related to “core parking” (temporarily suspending certain cores) and...

My database is 10GB, how big should my log be? .... I don't know. J That's not enough information to decide. You might find the best answer for your particular system is 10MB or 10GB or 100GB. It really depends on the amount of activity in the database...

I occasionally hear the question of whether you can create a one node SQL Server cluster. That basically means you have a virtualized instance of SQL Server with a virtual IP and virtual name that are differerent from the host box, but that there is only...

Configuring MAXDOP One of the few sp_configure options that good DBAs regularly change is “max degree of parallelism” or MAXDOP. So of course everyone is looking for the one best value to use for that setting. As with most things in...

SQL PASS is planning another 24 Hours of PASS (24HOP). It will be March 15-16, 2011. Since that is during Women’s History month all the speakers will be women. So if you’re a Woman in Tech (WIT) and know something about SQL or how Windows...

Women in Technology – Why Does it Matter? The yearly SQL PASS summit is always one of my favorite times of year. It’s a week packed full of great technical content and many networking opportunities. Not to mention the parties and fun...

Have you ever wanted to prove to yourself and others just how much you really know about SQL Server? The MCITP exams are a great start; they show you have a baseline level of knowledge about the product. However, sometimes it is possible to pass the MCITP...