dba

I recently received a question from a vendor about databases created by software vendors.

Whether I’m working as a DBA, a consultant, a teacher, or just answering questions in my inbox, I always end up needing a script to inspect statistics one way or another.

Here are some freshly written scripts for a classic DBA question: what’s going on in my stats?

It’s a big week for SQL Server! And it’s the perfect week to talk about this week’s question, which is about explaining to your management why it’s worth it to upgrade to SQL Server 2016, and which features you can use right away.

This is one of those little details that confused me a ton when I was first working with execution plans.

One problem with learning to work with plans is that there’s just SO MUCH to look at. And it’s a bit spread out. So, even when looking at a single tooltip, things can be confusing.

Let’s talk about the nested loop operator, who can be particularly weird to understand.

What are the best tools to collect and baseline wait statistics? Should you write your own? Watch the 18 minute video or read the episode transcript below.

The tempdb database is a strange place in SQL Server.

The NOINDEX option does change the behavior of DBCC CHECKDB (even if you’re already using PHYSICAL_ONLY). Here’s how the two options compare to one another, and how to see the difference yourself in a simple example.

You finally got approval to move to new hardware and a fresher version of SQL Server. After months of work,  you do the migration and then… performance gets worse. What can cause this, and what do you look for?

You’ve got 99 problems, and the request coming in ain’t one.

Maybe you need to channel your inner Cat DBA, just for a moment.

Psssttt – I have an updated blog post on this called the Learner’s Guide to SQL Server Performance Tuning

The SQL Server is slow, what should you do? I answer a reader question and share my strategy for performance troubleshooting.

Sometimes you need to script out all the indexes in a database. Maybe you’re concerned something has changed since they were last checked in. Or maybe the indexes aren’t checked into source control, and you’re working on fixing that. (Important!)

Either way, sometimes you need to do it, and it’s not fun through the GUI. I needed to write some fresh demo code for this recently, and I needed it to give the details for partitioned tables using data compression, and I thought I’d share.

Microsoft recently updated their policies and recommendations for installing cumulative updates.

Want to learn more about managing statistics updates in SQL Server? Watch my 27 minute presentation on managing statistics.

Planning to move to new hardware for your SQL Server? Techniques like log shipping and database mirroring can be incredibly useful to make the change fast and painless– but you’ve got to pick the right techniques for your environment ahead of time, and know how to do a few things that aren’t in the GUI.

Here are some of my favorite whitepapers and resources to get you going.

It’s sort of like Daylight Savings time for #TSQL2sday. Since PASS is next week and we’ll all be busy tweeting from the convention center instead of talking to one another face to face (or the opposite, take your pick), we’re blogging a week early.

This month’s topic is hosted by Paul Randal (blog | twitter), and the topic is “Why are DBA skills necessary?”