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Tuesday, November 17, 2009 7:03 AM

Channeling Bruce Lee: Tuning without Tuning

I’m leading a Performance Tuning workshop here in Portland, Oregon today, and I normally start this kind of workshop with a segment on “pre-tuning” – or, the steps you take so that you don’t have to tune as much later. When we set up a system is the greatest
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Monday, November 16, 2009 7:19 AM

Color Me Corrected – Will the REAL sysobjects please stand up?

A few days ago I posted a way to look at the Dynamic Management Views (DMV’s) using a query, which I then copy and paste into the Help viewer’s Index tab to learn more. Well, my good friend and Colleague, Cliff, pointed out that I was using the older
Posted by Buck Woody | 1 Comments
Thursday, November 12, 2009 7:12 AM

Store XML Document as Binary, Read as XML

I had an interesting question the other day, so I thought I would share both the question and the answer. We had an older application that had stored an XML document in a table as a binary data type column. I know, I know – we’ve had an XML data type
Posted by Buck Woody | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:04 AM

Find and learn DMVs

This morning I showed how I find DMVs, and find out how to use them. First, I just run this query:   USE MASTER; GO SELECT ‘sys.’ + name FROM sys.sysobjects WHERE name LIKE ‘dm%’   Then I copy and paste a result into the “Index” panel of Books
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Monday, November 02, 2009 6:28 AM

Win7 – Install SQL Server Native or go Virtual PC?

I have Windows 7 on my laptop, and I also teach, demo and use SQL Server 2005 and SQL server 2008. Should I install this “native” on my outside operating system or use the Virtual PC (VPC) software that comes with Windows 7? Well, there are arguments
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:13 AM

Templates for New Query Window

When I’m in SQL Server Management Studio and I click the “New Query” button, my Query Window comes up like this: /* <ScriptFileName, SYSNAME, ScriptFileName>.sql Purpose: <Purpose, SYSNAME, Purpose> Author: <Author, SYSNAME, Buck Woody>
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Monday, October 26, 2009 6:50 AM

How Normal(ized) Should You Be?

Normalization is the process of removing repeating values from your data design, and ensuring that the values depend on the Primary Key in the table. OK, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but this definition will do for this post. So how far DO you
Posted by Buck Woody | 2 Comments
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 8:37 AM

Color Your Connections

In cyber-space, no one can hear you scream. Have you ever connected to a server, thought it was a testing or development system, and only a split second after you pressed “F5” to run that command, realized that it was the production server? Yeah….me neither
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 8:44 AM

Go To Find Combo

A friend of mine – Bill Ramos – showed me a little-used feature in Management Studio that I’ve been using ever since. It’s a combo box that works in the Query Window and it allows you to find text quickly in a script, but it also has a hidden benefit.
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 6:45 AM

Great new Whitepaper on High Availability

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
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:26 AM

How Microsoft Does IT

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)
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Monday, September 14, 2009 7:14 AM

Using Perfmon Data in Profiler

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
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 09, 2009 9:15 AM

SQL Server Best Practices: Separate NIC for Maintenance and Transfers

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
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 02, 2009 7:27 AM

T-SQL Prettifiers

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.
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
Monday, August 31, 2009 7:10 AM

Directly Opening a Solution in SQL Server Management Studio

I use Solutions a lot in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and you should be aware of this simple tip: If you want to open a Solution without having to open SSMS and then jumping through all the menus, just double-click the solution name in the Windows
Posted by Buck Woody | 0 Comments
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