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
Documentation
June 18, 2009
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
Paranoid? Control Freak? Have I got a career for you…
June 1, 2009
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
Do you have a TAM?
April 30, 2009
Disclaimer: I mean what I am going to post. This is not a Microsoft fan boy post. That would include a conversation about my Zune, the Xbox 360 I don’t have or something… I think this is a great resource for a Microsoft shop. A TAM? Technical Account Manager. When your company pays for a
Manage Your Transactions (So They Don’t Manage You – Part 2)
April 16, 2009
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
Manage Your Transactions (So they don’t manage you – Part 1)
April 9, 2009
This is part 3 in a series on shrinking and transaction management. Click here for part 4. You can see them all in the Shrinking & Transactions category. If you are one of the people who have been reading this blog, you know where I stand on shrinking databases/log files. I don’t like the practice (Post 1,
Alphabet Blocks and a Solid Foundation
March 22, 2009
Continuing in the theme from last week’s post correlating the DBAs role to aspects of various careers (Pilots, Chefs and Doctors) an illustration came to me this past weekend. I was playing blocks with my 1 year old son. The game with him consists of me trying to hold him back for as long as
Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms
March 16, 2009
What do checklists, recipes or algorithms have to do with Database Administration? A lot… If we study a few career paths we can see how a checklist or process flow makes their lives easier. I love stealing ideas from everyday life, working them into something useful for my DBA career and I think we have