TechNet Magazine: January 2010 SQL Q&A column
Happy New Year! The January edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A
Happy New Year! The January edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A
(This is my last blog post for 2009 – thanks to everyone who reads my blog and takes part in the SQL community – hope
Earlier today there was a thread on Twitter asking about what degrees and academic background people have who work on SQL Server. I volunteered to
Earlier today there was a question on SQL Server Central where someone wanted to know what could be causing so many reads on their transaction
The first of our public classes (what we call Immersion Events) in 2010 is now officially open for registrations! We've teamed up with our good
I made them up. Yup. I’m talking about the guidance which is: if an index has less than 1000 pages and is in memory, don’t
This is an interesting performance bug concerning a broken query optimizer rule in 2008. Thanks to Dan Shargel (Twitter) for sending me info on this
My goodness – no sooner are we done with one crazy conference season when planning starts for the next lot! We've just finalized the line-up
2005 SP3 CU6 contains a fix for a corruption bug that can happen after rebuilding an XML index that contains XML elements greater than 8000
It's been a few weeks since my last posts but I've got a bunch in the pipeline coming up. Firstly, I've got it together to
We're sitting here in the Las Vegas airport on the way home to Seattle for 3 whole weeks and I've just finished uploading the resources
One of the things I love teaching is how the transaction log and logging/recovery work. I presented a session on this at both PASS and
Today's our rest day here at SQL Connections and one of the things on my list is to post all the resources from our recent
The November 2009 edition of TechNet Magazine is up on the web and contains my latest feature article, the second in a 3-part series on
It's PASS time again in Seattle and we've got a busy week lined up. It's going to be a cavalcade of meeting new people, and
For the last few weeks we were in Australia, teaching classes with our sister company SQLskills.com.au. After we were done with work we headed out
As part of the 2008 DBA class we’re teaching down here in Melbourne, I did a demo of using predicates and file targets with extended
I've finally gotten around to tidying up and posting a bunch of photos from the second half of our trip to Europe trip in September.
Over the last week or so I've been helping the Product Support folks at Microsoft write a new KB article which discusses some of the
Fall really is crazy travel season for us – a week after returning from our trip to Ireland and Poland and now we're in Australia
This is a question that came up yesterday on Twitter: will SQL Server always do a table scan to find the result of SELECT COUNT
On the last day of our week in Dublin we headed into the city centre to check out some of the sights. One of the
Over the last 18 months a group of SQL Server MVPs, led by Paul Nielsen and including Kimberly and I as editors, have been working on
One of the perennial problems facing both experienced and involuntary DBAs is how to tell whether a database is really in the Full recovery model
Last week I posted in-depth about how checkpoints work and what exactly goes on (see How do checkpoints work and what gets logged). About a
We're part-way through the Fall conference season, and in the middle of teaching week 1 of the current Microsoft Certified Master – SQL class. At
Yes, I'm a week late (at least) uploading these, and I apologize. But better late than never! For those lucky 48 people who attended our
The 35-page whitepaper on high availability I wrote for the SQL team over the summer has been published on MSDN. It’s a 2-300 level whitepaper
(Check out my Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Logging, Recovery, and the Transaction Log.) This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to do
(First blog post from Poland! We're here to present at the Microsoft Poland Technology Summit.) The October edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the
We've had a great week here in Dublin teaching our first public Immersion Event for a while – nearly 50 attendees spent the week with
Here's an interesting bug that surfaced recently, first reported by Bryan Smith on the MSDN disaster recovery/HA forum three weeks ago. One of the mechanisms I
At the start of September we took a trip out to Kalaloch and Cape Flattery. I've been there quite a few times but it was
This survey is based on a suggestion from Jonathan Kehayias (blog/Twitter). In this survey I'm asking two questions: When you're designing/implementing a database, do you
A few weeks ago I kicked off a survey asking what kind of disaster recovery guide/run-book/plan (I'll just call it a plan from now on)
While we were at Connections in Orlando in April, we sat down with our good friend Carl Franklin to discuss the conference, life, and a
I've been spending some time reorganizing my electronic components and came across a serious blast from the past… (Click the image for a larger
I'm constantly surprised by the number of people that don't follow the CSS SQL blog – some of the best SQL people in the industry
While we’re in Ireland teaching our Immersion Event (week-long in-depth class on SQL Server internals/performance/maintenance/DR), we’ll be doing a user group meeting as well in
In this survey I'd like to find out what kind of disaster recovery guide/run-book/plan you have, if any. When a disaster occurs, do you just
A few weeks ago I kicked off a survey on how you add geo-redundancy to a failover cluster (see here for the survey). The results
(Be sure to join our community to get our monthly newsletter with exclusive content, advance notice of classes with discount codes, and other SQL Server
I was reading a thread on SQL Server Central today where someone replied to a question and confused 823 with 832. Now, 823 is a
This week we're back down in Houston with a client and had a spare day so we decided to do the loop from Houston down
There's another SQL Quiz (from Chris Shaw) doing the rounds where people blog the answer and then tag someone. This I got tagged by two
Several times this week I've been asked about how to become an MVP. A few people have posted on this, but here's my take. I think
Here’s a question that came up recently: if I’ve upgraded a database from SQL 2000 or before, how can I tell if the data purity
We've finally nailed down the dates for all our Fall classes and conferences around the world. Here's the plan: September 21-25. Kimberly and I will be teaching
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