Mike Walsh

Mike loves mentoring clients on the right Systems or High Availability architectures because he enjoys those lightbulb moments and loves watching the right design and setup come together for a client. He started Straight Path in 2010 when he decided that after over a decade working with SQL Server in various roles, it was time to try and take his experience, passion, and knowledge to help clients of all shapes and sizes. Mike is a husband, father to four great children, and a Christian. He’s a volunteer Firefighter and EMT in his small town in New Hampshire, and when he isn’t playing with his family, solving SQL Server issues, or talking shop, it seems like he has plenty to do with his family running a small farm in NH raising Beef Cattle, Chickens, Pigs, Sheep, Goats, Honeybees and who knows what other animals have been added!

How To Manage The SQL Server Transaction Log File

February 7, 2020February 4, 2017 by Mike Walsh

“Help! My SQL Server transaction log file has run out of space on my SQL Server!”, “Why is my SQL Server Log file so big?”, “How do I shrink my SQL LDF?” – I hear these questions all the time. I’ve been blogging since 2009 and way back then I wrote some posts about shrinking, … Read more

DevOps: Don’t Forget The Ops

February 7, 2020February 1, 2017 by Mike Walsh

I want to commend the team at GitLab.com – they had an issue that took down a key database and everything else with it effectively and when they came back, there was data not coming back. This happens. This happens in “Traditional” 1.0 IT companies (ask my usual airline, Delta, they’ll tell you two stories … Read more

Optimize For Ad Hoc Workloads – Enable or not?

February 7, 2020January 30, 2017 by Mike Walsh

With today’s Straight Up SQL Server tip, I want to talk about a setting I have so far only ever recommended to enable: Optimize for Ad Hoc Workloads. Rather than just make a suggestion, I want to keep in the spirit of the tips for beginner approach to the series and describe a little of … Read more

Dr. Cloud-Move or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

February 7, 2020January 27, 2017 by Mike Walsh

With apologies to Mr. Kubrick for my title, I’ll give you a little honest backstory. I’ve been working with SQL Server for 17 years now. Mostly in the box, on-premises. I’ve done all sorts of things with SQL Server. Always heading back to DBA, performance tuning, high availability, etc. My career owes a lot to … Read more

SQL Server Corruption – Read Before it Happens

February 7, 2020January 24, 2017 by Mike Walsh

SQL Server Corruption is a rather complex topic. As a consultant, I’ve been called in many times to help a client suffering from SQL Server corruption in some form or another. As a forum post answerer I’ve helped some pretty sad situations and tried to help. There have been times when I’ve reached out to … Read more

DBA Questions To Ask Software Vendors

March 6, 2021January 17, 2017 by Mike Walsh

Questions for a DBA To Ask a Software Vendor

Do you buy software from independent software vendors? Does it run on SQL Server? Are you responsible for supporting that software? Here are some questions that you can ask a software vendor about the way they use SQL Server. It’s best to ask these questions before you are a customer, too; you’ll have a bit … Read more

SQL Server Version Numbers – Do they matter?

March 5, 2022January 17, 2017 by Mike Walsh

It’s a trick question, yes. Your SQL Server version matters! In this post I’ll tell you how to check your version, talk about what makes up the version number and talk about why it matters so much and why you should get a plan in place to regularly upgrade or update SQL Server. This post is part of … Read more