We all know indexes are good and I’m hoping everyone knows you can have too many indexes. That means we should be careful when adding new indexes right? So when should we add a new index? Here are my general rules of thumb, although of course, you should always use your best judgment. Also, this…
Year: 2017
Distinguish backup file names or pay the price!
SQL instances shouldn’t do this So far, no one has found exercise to be beneficial to servers. Purposeless repetitive motion may be good for human muscles, but your SQL Server instance experiences no gain for the pain. Here’s a good example: taking useless backups. (“Did she say useless backups? I’ve never heard
Who Needs a DBA?
I was perusing my RSS Feeds this morning, and came across an article by Steve Jones (b|t) about Changing Times. In this post Steve talks about Microsoft not having any DBAs in their cloud team, and that it is all managed by DevOps folks. This message came from a talk that was given at SQLBits and…
Updated SQL Server on VMware Best Practices Guide
I am proud to announce that we contributed to the latest revision of the Microsoft SQL Server on VMware best practices guide, freely available at this address. This document outlines some of the common VM-level tweaks and adjustments that are made when running enterprise SQL Server VMs on VMware platforms. This guide is considered a must-read…
Limits vs Goals
It’s that time again. Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan (b/t) is the host this month and has a fun topic for us. The daily (database-related) WTF Database horror stories. Things that make your eyes pop and not in a good way. What a fun topic! But not an easy one for me. Generally, when I see a…
SQL maintenance is a lifecycle, not an event!
You’ve heard me talk about this many times, in so many different ways, but it’s worth repeating: SQL maintenance lifecycles are important. People who disagree, disagree because they spend too much time firefighting and don’t have time to really think about it. Don’t know anything about SQL maintenance lifecycles? Let’s
VMware Updates In-Guest Clocks When You Say Not To
VMware’s VMTools package has some options for synchronizing the in-guest clock with the time of the ESXi host. By default, these are set to disabled, and under most circumstances, the hypervisor follows these settings and everything is fine. However, several situations exist where the hypervisor will reset the in-guest time, even though the VMTools setting…
Using GROUP BY instead of DISTINCT
Recently, Aaron Bertrand (b/t) posted Performance Surprises and Assumptions : GROUP BY vs. DISTINCT. In it he says he prefers GROUP BY over DISTINCT. He discusses the fact that GROUP BY will, in fact, under certain circumstances, produce a faster query plan. I highly recommend taking the time to read it. In fact, if you…
Event storming! It’s raining emails!
One of the most common ways to get an event notification is by email. So what happens when you get 500 emails in a day and only one or two are actionable? Do you read every single email? Spending quite literally hours to find those one or two gems? Or do you just ignore the…
Queries with optional parameters
These are those queries where you are pulling for, let’s say, a first name, a last name, a state, and/or a city. Simple enough, until you notice that or. We might only get a first name, or a state and the query still needs to work. These queries are commonly called Catch all queries Kitchen…