There was an interesting discussion on Twitter this morning (started by my good friend Erin Stellato (blog|twitter)) about in-place updates for index records where the key value changes and the record remains on the same page. Various sources including the SQL Server 2008 Internals book (pg 361 – I didn't write or review that bit [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
Do changes to index keys really do in-place updates?
Posted on: February 25, 2011 9:22 am
Better together – the importance of great inter-team relationships
Posted on: February 24, 2011 7:03 am
Back at the end of January I kicked off a survey about the relationship between your DBA and dev teams. See here for the survey. Here are the results: The 22 Other values are: 5 x The devs are great – it's the apps and the process that suck. 4 x It depends on [...]
SQLskills hires deep technical expert Jonathan Kehayias
Posted on: February 23, 2011 11:57 am
Today is a very exciting day for us here at SQLskills.com as we take the first step at growing as a company instead of solely partnering with other consultants with their own companies. While we value our partnerships and plan to continue many, we also value the benefits brought by having a small and dedicated [...]
RunAs Radio show #200… not our most technical show…
Posted on: February 23, 2011 11:31 am
Last Friday our great friends Richard Campbell (who MC'd our wedding) and Greg Hughes invited us to record their 200th RunAs Radio podcast with them – a signal honor for which we thank them deeply! We've both been on RunAs Radio (and .Net Rocks!) before but this show was meant to be a fun tour around [...]
Survey: how is your tempdb configured?
Posted on: February 22, 2011 3:03 pm
In this week's survey, I want to know how you've got tempdb configured compared to the number of processor cores SQL Server thinks it has. I'll correlate, analyze, and present the results like the log file survey I did last year where I got results for 17000 databases. The code I'd like you to run [...]
Updated database size survey results
Posted on: February 22, 2011 1:22 pm
Last week I kicked off a survey about the size of the largest single SQL Server database in your company – see here for the survey. I was interested to see how the distribution has changed since I did the same survey a few years ago. 2011 results: 2009 results: Very interesting! As [...]
London calling…
Posted on: February 19, 2011 8:59 am
Continuing our musical theme this week is the The Clash with their classic '79 album London Calling… Which incidentally, is what's been happening to us over the last month as so many of you have asked us to bring our Immersion Events to the UK for the first time ever. Well, we've answered your [...]
Leaving the Land of Confusion…
Posted on: February 17, 2011 7:56 am
I've been a big fan of Genesis since as long as I can remember, and I especially like their 1986 album Invisible Touch with the cool song Land of Confusion. Over the last couple of months we've led you into the Land of Confusion. We revamped and expanded our training classes late last year and [...]
Unbelievable tale of disaster and recovery
Posted on: February 16, 2011 8:18 am
A few days ago one of my new blog readers (a pretty smart cookie, as you'll see) sent me a tale of database catastrophe and an excellent recovery that I’d like to share with you. The story’s been made anonymous and is published with full permission of the author (highlights in bold are mine). Hey [...]
Community, community, community, community…
Posted on: February 14, 2011 2:08 pm
Back when I was at Microsoft, I witnessed Steve Balmer doing his mad "Developers, developers, developers, developers!" mantra a few times. (Checkout this video of him doing it here.) Here at SQLskills.com, our mantra is "Community, community, community, community!". You guys out there recognized that and voted us the #2 SQL company that's "doing it right" [...]
Survey: what’s the largest SQL Server database at your company?
Posted on: February 14, 2011 12:11 pm
In my survey this week I'd like to find out how large the largest single SQL Server database is at your company (how much space does the data take up on disk, roughly). I ran a similar survey almost two years ago and I think it will be interesting to compare the results. [Edit: the [...]
My name is Kyle, and I’ve got SQLskills
Posted on: February 10, 2011 6:10 am
It's all very well hearing about how cool our training classes our from *us*, but what do attendees like you think? I recently did an email interview with Kyle Hayes, a member of the Production DBA Team for Bridgepoint Education. He attended our Immersion Event back in August 2010 in Bellevue, WA. Here's what Kyle [...]
Importance of network latency when using database mirroring
Posted on: February 8, 2011 10:02 am
Last week I kicked off a survey about network latencies and database mirroring. See here for the original post. Here are the results of the survey: I was really interested to see whether the proportion of people doing asynchronous mirroring became higher as the network latency increased. Although this isn't a statistically valid sampe [...]
Survey: what’s your plan for a plan?
Posted on: February 6, 2011 10:00 am
In my survey for this week I'm interested in what you look for first when analyzing a query plan. I'll report on the results around mid-February. Thanks! PS Post comments are disabled to avoid skewing the results.
