Back in early 2006, I was still working at my first ever DBA job. I had only been a DBA for a little less than 3 years, but I felt like I knew a lot. I spent every night on the forums helping people with issues as a way of learning new things myself. But…
Year: 2013
SQL Server Virtual Machine vNUMA Sizing
A wonderful gentleman who attended my SQL PASS Summit session this year recently emailed me and asked me a great question about optimal setup for SQL Server virtual machine vCPU and vNUMA configurations. I thought about the question and realized that while the session went into a light level of detail, I can go much…
Grody to the VARCHAR(MAX)
This morning I was looking through a new vendor database to see exactly what I would be supporting and I stumbled upon a curious table. This table seemed quite normal to the naked eye until I glanced upon the data types. There were four, count them four fields set to VARCHAR(MAX) and two set to…
You Can’t Meet Your RPO/RTO With AlwaysOn
“That title may have caught your attention. AlwaysOn is the future of HA/DR for SQL Server, and has been since the release of SQL 2012. AlwaysOn is actually a marketing term which covers Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) and Availability Groups (AGs). Allan Hirt (@sqlha | blog) is a strong proponent of ensuring that people understand…
Lock Pages in Memory in SQL Server on VMware – Why or Why Not
Two weeks ago I presented my session entitled “Squeezing Top Performance from Your Virtualized SQL Server” at the SQL PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. One comment that I made during my presentation that seemed to spark some debates is how I normally enable the ‘Lock Pages in Memory’ feature of SQL Server as part…
Best Advice Ever: Learn By Helping Others
I remember when back in 2001 my friend and former SQL Server MVP Carlos Eduardo Rojas was busy earning his MVP street-cred in the NNTP forums, aka Newsgroups. I always thought he was playing the Sheriff trying to put some order in a Wild Wild West town by trying to understand what these people were…
Best practice recommendations for writing Dynamic SQL
Note this is not “Best Practices when USING Dynamic SQL”. These are just good habits I’ve come up with over the years to make sure that when writing my dynamic SQL it breaks less often. Note I don’t say “doesn’t break ever”, dynamic SQL is tricky stuff. The best you are likely to get is…
Network Packet Size: to Fiddle With or Not to Fiddle With
A network pipeline isn’t nearly as pleasant to look at as the oil pipeline (or anything) in Alaska, but it’s something that DBAs should be aware of. There is a server configuration in SQL Server that controls the size of packet in which SQL Server sends out data. This setting is called network packet size…
Developing To Specifications
I’m a DBA. As a class of people you will find that DBAs have a tendency to rant a little about developers. I would certainly be someone that you would find in that category. The trouble is that most of the time I don’t think that it is the developers fault, it is just a…
DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 3 - Use a Wiki for Documentation
Retaking on this blog series after an extended hiatus. I hope you will enjoy today’s topic on documentation. Boring Work? Nope – An Opportunity One of the often neglected and yet extremely important tasks of any DBA is to document his/her environment. I can certainly relate to those of you who haven’t written a…