It’s Friday, and I’m out of town on vacation in historic Williamsburg, VA (if any burglars are reading this, I forgot to feed the 5 rabid Rottweilers that I’m fostering so feel free to stop by and visit them). What does that have to do with upgrades and migrations? Nothing. Just making conversation, but that…
Month: September 2017
I’m the new DBA, and I’m locking down development servers
Many times, I’ve started with a company as one of their first, if not the first DBA. They’ve acquired enough servers now, with enough data moving around, that they just can’t continue as they are. There’s no shortage of developers to can write stored procedures or SSIS packages, or to write a new page for…
5 Tips for Friday: Transaction Log
For this week’s 5 Tips for Friday, I want to talk about some best practices for the transaction log. The transaction log in SQL Server is a critical component of a database, and it can affect performance and recoverability of the database. It warrants special care and maintenance. Back it up often: The goal with…
Do what I say, not what I do
You’ll hear a lot of rules and best practices from senior IT people (not just data folks, all of them). You’ll also then see those same people do what they told you not to. I told you not to use NOLOCK even though I use it sometimes. I told you not to shrink databases, even…
5 Tips for Friday: Query Tuning
Time for another 5 Tips for Friday. Truth be told, I almost forgot that it was Friday so this week’s post is coming late int he day. This week’s fast, fun tips are all about tuning queries. Look at current waits, not total waits: I see it asked time and time again in the forums…
PASS Summit 2017 Precon – Virtual SQL Servers: Right to Ludicrous Speed
PASS has continues to ramp up the plans for the PASS Summit in Seattle this October, and my precon session, “Virtual SQL Servers – Right to Ludicrous Speed” has a few open slots for this Tuesday session. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I’m thrilled to be able to present to the…
T-SQLTuesday #94: Using Invoke-SQLCmd to run SQL Jobs Remotely
It’s time for another T-SQLTuesday blog party, and it’s being hosted this month by Rob Sewell (blog|@sqldbawithbeard). So export-ideas from his announcement post or create a new-idea of your own, and then join in the party. For my contribution to this event, I want to talk about how I prefer to use a remote job…
Quiz: How well do you know Recovery best practices?
Check out our new quiz. Quiz #2: How well do you know Recovery best practices? In case you missed it, our first quiz can be found here: Quiz: How well do you know SQL Server configuration best practices?.
5 Tips for Friday: Security
Today I am starting a new series called 5 Tips for Friday. Every Friday, I will post 5 best practice tips for a particular subject. For the inaugural 5 Tips for Friday, I am going to post tips about Security. Don’t use impersonation: Unfortunately, some people think that the recommendation to use Windows authentication means…
SQL Saturday Minnesota Preconference Training Session
This is just a quick reminder to encourage you to attend my next round of all-day precon training session at the upcoming SQL Saturday in Minnesota on Friday, October 6 called ‘The Complete Primer to SQL Server Infrastructure and Cloud‘. The focus of the course is to help those new to the enterprise server infrastructure concepts become familiar with the concept…