It’s time once again for 5 Tips for Friday. This week’s topic is Database Configurations. Beware default file growth settings: Unless the database is always going to be tiny, the default database file growth settings are horrible. If your log file is 1 GB, then adding 10% of space is not an issue. But each…
Month: October 2017
Necessity is the Mother of Automation
If you have worked with me or are a frequent reader of my blogs or a frequent attendee of my presentations, you know I hate doing things manually. Over my career, I have found that one of the biggest enemies of automation is being able to get someone else to do it manually. If you…
Which is the performance killer: SELECT INTO or INSERT INTO?
There are many ways to kill performance in a script or stored procedure. However, not many think about the possibility that adding columns to a temporary table can kill performance. Here, I’m going to show you how a simple design decision – using INSERT vs ALTER TABLE – can have a huge impact on your procedure…
Podcast with SQL Data Partners on Patching Best Practices
Recently, I joined Carlos L Chacon (site|@CarlosLChacon), Steve Stedman (blog|@SqlEmt), and the rest of the SQL Data Partners Podcast team for their podcast show and the episode went live earlier this month. We talked about best practice and the reality of patching SQL Server. Check out the podcast to get my take on keeping up…
When is it a good idea to consolidate multiple instances?
In this age of cost-saving after cost-saving, one way you may be looking at saving money is by combining multiple instances into one in order to save on licensing/machine costs. Or possibly you have a new database and want to decide if it can reside on an existing instance or if you need a whole…
5 Tips for Friday: Deployments
I had some very thoughtful conversations (not lectures … really) this week about deploying changes to SQL Server databases. I want to share some of those best practice tips here with you today. Don’t rely on manual steps: As I see it, there are two reasons why manual steps are bad. Humans are imperfect, are…
5 Tips for Friday: Public Speaking
The PASS Summit is coming up at the end of this month; thus, public speaking is on my mind. This has inspired me to make this week’s 5 Tips for Friday about public speaking. These tips don’t just apply for conferences, big or small, they also apply to any public speaking you may do, like…
sys.objects VS helper functions (OBJECT_ID, OBJECT_NAME, etc)
I’ve you’ve done much work with the system views (DMVs for example) then you’ve had to translate an object_id into a schemaname and objectname and vise versa. To do that you’ve either used the functions OBJECT_ID, OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME, and OBJECT_NAME or sys.objects and sys.schemas. So what’s the difference? Well, each version has its pros and cons.…
Small identity columns
We frequently talk about dealing with outgrowing INT identity columns. What we don’t talk about all that often is small tables. Where we don’t even need an INT. An IDENTITY column can be any of the following data types tinyint, smallint, int, bigint, decimal(p,0), or numeric(p,0). INT and BIGINT we talk about all the time,…
Quiz: How well do you know security best practices?
Check out our new quiz. Quiz #3: How well do you know security best practices? In case you missed any of our previous quizzes, they can all be found here: All Quizzes.