Work costs something whenever you do it… This weekend we had some nice weather on Sunday. In between church activities and family time, I took advantage of the weather to get some work done on our vegetable garden. We chose to try a “no dig” raised bed vegetable garden. Basically you pile various materials (grass … Read more
Where? Quest Connect is an online series of webcasts on various topics. Some are pre-recorded (like the session that I did.. more on that later…). They have web casts on a variety of topics, not just SQL. You can look at the on demand topic listing here to see all the chats that will be … Read more
SQL Server Implicit Conversion – A Silent Perf Killer I recently had the opportunity to work with a developer at the day job. He was using a loop (for what he was doing, it makes sense 🙂 ), and he had a query that ran great when he stripped the question out of the process, … Read more
So I wrote a lot of posts around shrinking (Here, here, here). Some of my posts were turned into a wiki article on SQLServerPedia. I thought I was done posting about this but one more. I talked about why we shouldn’t do it on a regular basis. Why it should really be reserved for use … Read more
Documentation (…Or how I learned to stop procrastinating and love tolerate a chore necessary task) Do you document? Do you document well? As I told Paul Randal (twitter, blog) today on twitter, this blog post was inspired by an observation in the shower and a recent question by Brent Ozar (twitter, blog). You didn’t need … Read more
The above personality traits sound like bad news. In most areas of life they certainly can be. That being said a DBA needs to have a certain aspect of these to best do their jobs. As I blogged about in “Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms“, I describe other careers where a keen eye to detail and … Read more
This is the final in a series on shrinking and transactions. You can see them all in the Shrinking & Transactions category. In part 1, we talked about factors that affect transaction log growth. We talked about what a SQL Server transaction is and the various modes SQL interacts with a transaction (Autocommit, Implicit Transactions and … Read more