The signs that the Illuminati exist are all around us. You can find their marking on our buildings, on our currency, and even in our music videos. The Illuminati thrive by spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). They’ve been using FUD for centuries to …
CPUs are running faster now than ever before, solid-state drives are replacing spinning disks, and database servers have terabytes of RAM. Because these resources are plentiful and increasingly affordable, it can seem tempting to solve database performance issues with hardware. But consider this example: …
In my seven years as a production DBA, I can count on one hand the number of times I have need to restore the master database as a result of a disaster. In other words, this isn’t something you will find yourself needing to …
In 2013, Microsoft made it available for customers to utilize virtual machines running in Windows Azure. This allowed customers to run an on-premises version of SQL Server, but have the instance hosted in the cloud. The natural question then became, “How do I connect …
When you create a database in SQL Server and do not specify a file location for your data and log files, SQL Server will rely on the default locations as defined in the server properties. You can see these properties for yourself by right-clicking …
Microsoft SQL Server comes with a boatload of additional components. One component is the SQL Agent. The purpose of the SQL Agent is to serve as a job scheduler. Many experienced DBAs use jobs running inside the SQL Agent to perform routine tasks such …
You can use the information in the SQL Server plan cache to research performance issues and investigate opportunities for performance improvement. In this three-part article series, we’ve examined several important opportunities you have in mining information from the plan cache, including eliminating single-use plans …
The SQL Server plan cache can be a good tool to use in identifying current performance issues and in looking for new ways to improve performance. In this second part of a three-part article series, we’ll look at how to examine the plan cache …
The SQL Server plan cache stores details on statements that are executed over time. Each time a statement executes, SQL Server will look inside the plan cache first to see if a plan already exists. If a plan exists, SQL Server will use that …
I wrote a couple of posts previously on SQL Server consolidation. The first post tried to give insight on some of the problems and associated motivating factors that most companies have for consolidation efforts. The second post was an attempt to cover some of the decision factors …
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