There is another quiz going around the SQL Server blogosphere. Great question again, “How did you get started with SQL Server?” I was tagged by Denis Gobo (Blog, Twitter) when he answered this question here. You can hit his blog to track the lineage of this one. I have been working with SQL Server for … Read more
All of our SQL Server instances need benchmarks! So the title is somewhat of a trick question… I hear and sense a lack of priority around taking periodic benchmarks in a system with a lot of folks. How often do you take benchmarks? Do you know what “normal” means for your system? Do you know … Read more
How many times have you heard or uttered those words? You work hard and understand the business requirements, you try and get the logic to work to make the procedure return what was expected or update the data as expected. You do some unit tests in your environment, it may not scream but it comes … 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