A couple of days ago I posted a stored procedure (sp_GetAGInformation) which queried multiple DMVs to pull together a bunch of Availability Group information. If you took a look at the code you would see that it used a couple of CTEs (Common Table Expressions). CTEs are a great way to do recursive work, and…
Year: 2014
Performance Counters: Why It Depends
When you’re working through some vague performance issues (e.g., “SQL Server seems slow today”), one of the common things to do is to collect some performance counters. If you are collecting performance counters for the first time on the server, you don’t have anything to compare them against. This usually leads to searching the web…
Rolling Upgrades With Availability Groups – A Warning
One of the great options provided by Availability Groups, in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition and newer, is the ability to perform rolling upgrades to new Service Packs or Cumulative Updates. The basic idea is that you apply the update to one of the AG secondary servers and then perform a failover of SQL to…
On Community and Recognition
Even though way early in my career I had a SQL Server MVP as a mentor (by pure chance), it wasn’t until 2008-2009 that I sort of researched a bit more about the program, and what it really meant. I was beginning to understand how powerful networking in our community really is, and how…
DBA: Guardian of the Data
I was asked recently by Idera to take a look at the things that could cost a DBA their job. This has lead to a new whitepaper I wrote about the 5 mistakes that DBAs make that can cost them their jobs. Watch Idera’s Resource Central or follow @Idera_Software on Twitter to see when the…
Who Owns SQL Backups?
I was asked by Idera to take a look at the things that could cost a DBA their job. This has lead to a new whitepaper I wrote about the 5 mistakes that DBAs make that can cost them their jobs. Watch Idera’s Resource Central or follow @Idera_Software on Twitter to see when the whitepaper…
Retrofit a VM with the VMware Paravirtual SCSI Driver
For those of you with your mission-critical servers already virtualized on a VMware-based virtual infrastructure, are you using the VMware Paravirtual SCSI driver to boost your I/O performance by an average of 12%? I use it for all of my I/O intensive virtual machines, including SQL Server and Oracle VMs, and you should too! By…