Functions might seem to be the answer to all of your desires to consolidate code, and at times they could be. But if you don't know enough about them, they may turn out to be the source of all of your problems and opening the door to architecture choke full of disaster. This week, I'll … Continue reading Webcast “Performance Impacts of User Defined Functions” This Week with Pragmatic Works
Wouldn't it be nice if you had a chance to try out the features of SQL Server? Maybe give them a run-through before your managers asks you to make recommendations on whether to upgrade and what the value in doing so will be. For those of us that don't have the time to build out … Continue reading Five Virtual Labs for the SQL Server 2012 DBA
Have you ever had to calculate bitmasks on the fly? I have and still do. In this post, I'm going to show a simple PowerShell script that can be used to generate bitmask values. But first, let's look at a reason that you may have to use bitmasks. Many of today's servers have a fair number of … Continue reading Calculate Bitmasks In PowerShell
Ever have your SQL Server slow down for reasons that you can't explain? Or did you spend all night tuning a query to perfection only to have it bog down in production? Want to find out what's going on? If so, read on... This week, I'll be presenting my session "What Are You Waiting For … Continue reading Webcast “Value of Performing Wait Analysis” This Week with Pragmatic Works
Seems so early in the year, but it's already time to start getting ready for this year's PASS Summit. There are two things to think about early on with the summit. First, what are you expecting from the summit? The summit is built based on community input and PASS needs to hear your opinions on what … Continue reading Start Getting Ready for PASS Summit 2013
Not exactly groundbreaking information, but were you aware that you can run SQLIO with multiple files? Until a couple months ago, I hadn't really paid attention to that little fact. And maybe I'm the only person that didn't know, but figured I would share it anyways. How Multiple Files? Using SQLIO with multiple files is … Continue reading Running SQLIO with Multiple Files
This month, Wayne Sheffield (Blog | @DBAWayne) is running T-SQL Tuesday on PowerShell. T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blogging event where a number of us in the SQL Server community gets together to blog on a central topic. The topic that was chosen for this month was PowerShell. And more specifically: "Blog about using PowerShell for doing, … Continue reading T-SQL Tuesday – Powershell and Perfmon Results – #TSQL2sDay
February is a short month... and if you are following the Monday's you know that today's the second Monday of the not the first. The first Monday is when this update is usually due out. Unfortunately, I was fairly sick last week and didn't get to working on this blog post. I should have had a … Continue reading February 2013 – Monthly SQL Server Checklist
Have you ever needed to figure out which filegroup your tables are located within? If you had to do this, you might think it's as easy joining sys.tables to sys.filegroups. But its a little more complicated than that because tables aren't stored in filegroups. It's The Indexes It's the indexes for a table that determine … Continue reading Determining Filegroup for a Table
Earlier this year, I finally passed the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) for SQL Server 2008 certification. In the process of preparing for the MCM lab portion, I did a lot of studying. One of the my key resources, were the MCM Readiness Videos that SQLSkills put together a couple years back. The thing is, even if … Continue reading 5 MCM Readiness Indexing Videos You Should Watch
Strate SQL 