How do -you- install SQL Server? (Part 3)
November 30, 2009
Welcome to part 3 in this series on a thought process around SQL Server Installation. In Part 1, we started talking about some basic steps and a thought process for a repeatable success story with your SQL Server installations. Part 2 discussed security, playing around before doing a first install and smoke testing afterwards. Today
How do -you- install SQL Server? (Part 2)
November 23, 2009
Welcome to this series on a thought process around SQL Server Installation. In Part 1, we started talking about some basic steps and a thought process for a repeatable success story with your SQL Server installations. Today let’s continue that story and talk some more about installation planning and success. We’ll finish up talking about
How do -you- install SQL Server (Part 1)
November 17, 2009
No, this is not an installation guide There is documentation for that found in many places. First good place to look is Books Online (2005/2008) but there are plenty of other community resources found at sites like SQL Server Central and SQLServerPedia as well as blogs. What I mean by this post is to ask,
Work Now or Work (And Pay) Later
November 16, 2009
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
How to use sp_configure in SQL Server
October 20, 2009
2018 Update – Straight Up SQL Server Tips posts – this is an edit as part of our SQL Server tips when we referenced SP_Configure there –> Not much has changed with sp_configure in SQL Server. The below post is still quite current as far as how to use sp_configure or sys.configurations to check and change
Free SQL Training Online – Wednesday 10/21/09
October 17, 2009
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
SQL Server Implicit Conversion: You Could Be Suffering Right Now!
September 1, 2009
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,
Benchmarking… Who Needs It?
August 7, 2009
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
Worked fine in development…
July 22, 2009
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
A Picture That Says, “Don’t Shrink!” (and other things…)
June 19, 2009
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