With the holiday season upon us for much of the world, I find myself thinking of ways to ensure that we have a quiet season outside of the office. Nobody wants to spend a family get-together fixing problems at work. I know most of you know what I mean. It’s a DBA’s lot in life…
Tag: 5 Tips for Friday
5 Tips for Friday: Monitoring and Alerting
I really think monitoring is an under-appreciated topic in our industry. Sure, that’s several companies that make pretty good morning writing monitoring software. Cards on the table, I even worked for one of them several years ago. Whether you invest in 3rd party monitoring software or not, you really should have some full solution in…
5 Tips for Friday: Naming Conventions
I want to talk about some best practices concerning naming conventions. Most teams or organizations will come up with their own naming conventions for things. This post is not here to tell anyone how to define their naming conventions, especially for things outside of SQL Server. I want to talk specifically about things inside the…
5 Tips for Friday: Waits and Queues
This Friday I want to talk about some best practices for troubleshooting queries using waits and queues. Waits and queues are excellent tools for trying to figure out why a query is running slower than you think it should be running. When a query has to wait for some reason, the query enters a suspended…
5 Tips for Friday: Replication
Time to talk about a subject that most DBAs hate, but some DBAs like me have a love-hate relation with it. Replication. Not storage replication or Availability groups. That old workhorse SQL Server data replication. Limit the number of articles per publication: Having to occasionally rebuild replication is a humongous pain in the backside, but…
5 Tips for Friday: Massively Parallel Queries
My day-to-day jobs deals mostly with performance tuning queries that run massively parallel. Like hundreds or thousands of the same query with different parameter values. With a normal query, 1 extra second of run time does not matter much. If the query has 2000 versions running at the same time, that’s an extra 2000 seconds…
5 Tips for Friday: Database Configurations
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…
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…
5 Tips for Friday: Availability Groups
It’s Friday again and time for another set of tips. It’s 5 Tips for Friday! This week I want to give you some best practices for managing and administering Availability Groups. Don’t skip past quorum: How always on your Always On* solution is often depends on how you have configured quorum. Quorum is often overlooked,…