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…
Tag: General BP
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…
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…
Checklist: DR Plan Sanity Check
If a disaster struck tomorrow, are you ready for it? Are you sure you thought of everything? I cannot count the number of times something happened, and I thought that I should have been able to anticipate that. It can be a big benefit to get another viewpoint on your disaster plan. No matter how…
Coding Naked
I know the title sounds like clickbait, but it’s how I’ve felt for a long time. Why? Because of CASE tools. CASE stands for Computer-Aided Software Engineering. Here, I’m referring to data modeling tools like ErWin and ER/Studio. It disheartens me that the industry as a whole has gotten away
Turning ANSI_PADDING off, and why you shouldn’t
I ran into an interesting error the other day while doing a partition switch. Partition switch failed because : column ‘xyz’ does not have the same ANSI trimming semantics in tables ‘a’ and ‘b’ It turned out it was because the ANSI_PADDING setting was different between the two tables (well, for a single column). So…
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…
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…
The Costs of Hiring Cheaper Consultants
From time to time, I see posts in forums from people complaining about how much some consultants charge. A really good consultant is never going to be cheap. That’s just the law of supply and demand at work right there. When I was consulting, I had plenty of people balk at my consulting price. I…
The Right Way To Attend PASS Summit
TL;DR – there is no right, or wrong way to attend the Summit. Decide on the things that are important to you, and what you want to get out of the days while you are there, and focus on those. With the 2016 PASS Summit coming up in a few weeks there are lots of…