Author Archive
Selectively Updating Statistics
Most blogs should have a disclaimer that your mileage may vary. That’s not the case here. I can assure you that your mileage will vary. Test this before you run it against your 12 TB production data warehouse. I recently inherited a few servers that have autoupdate of statistics disabled. That’s a long story. In [...]
The PNR Datatype
About sixty years ago, American Airlines, in conjunction with IBM, revolutionized an industry by introducing the first computer-based inventory management system called SABRE. This was revolutionary in many ways. Not only did it change the way the travel industry booked plane tickets and hotel rooms, but it also gave the public their first view of [...]
Random Blogs
A couple of weeks ago, I presented at the SNESSUG and had an excellent time. They’re a great group and were a lot of fun. One of my slides was to “Beware of Advice from Random Blogs.” I say this because there is just so much bad advice out there. Know your sources. Challenge the [...]
Top Ten Operational Mistakes at SNESSUG
Tonight, I’m presenting my Top Ten Operational Mistakes at the Southern New England SQL Server User Group meeting. I gave this presentation at SQL Saturday in South Florida and it was a lot of fun. I’ve updated it slightly to include a warning on avoiding advice from random bloggers. My benchmark there is if someone [...]
Confirming Objects Modified
I work in a hosting environment, and frequently our clients will ask us to promote a stored procedure (or some other schema object) through the DEV, TEST, Production environments. We have one client that is really big on seeing some type of evidence that we did what we say we did. I wrote this little [...]
Setting All Databases to SIMPLE Recovery Mode
I’m cleaning up some stuff in my dev environment today, and I have some pretty big transaction log files. These have gotten big even though I do regular full and transaction log backups. In order to do some maintenance work, I wrote this little nugget this morning. It’s anther script that generates a script. Again, [...]
Stopping a Series of SQL Agent Jobs
Yesterday, I participated in my first DR test at this company. It was a long day, but we learned a lot. This was also our first SQL Server client that we tested. For our Oracle clients, the Oracle DBAs have this process down to a science. We’re using Log Shipping for our DR environment, and [...]
Audit Prep Toolkit
When I was the DBA at Acme Packet, we went through a Sarbanes Oxley audit at least twice a year. It’s the price you pay for being a publicly traded company. One of the things I learned in my tenure there was that the best way to survive an audit is to anticipate what the [...]
SQL PASS Summit: This is Community
I’m writing this post on my flight from Seattle to Boston. (via Atlanta) The 2011 PASS Summit is a fond memory. And I made an observation this week. There are people who go to the summit to learn, and then there are people who go for the entire experience. I learned a ton sitting in [...]
PASS Summit 2011: It’s Not Over #sqlpass
Tomorrow is the last day of the PASS Summit, and it’s hard to believe that I’ve been running at this frenetic pace since Monday. I wanted to get some thoughts down before I went back to work and these thoughts got lost. This post isn’t going through my normal editing and waiting period process, so [...]