(The Curious Case of… used to be part of our bi-weekly newsletter but we decided to make it a regular blog post instead so it can sometimes be more
In both my wait statistics pre-conference workshops at the PASS Summit and SQLintersection I promised to do a bunch of blog posts. The second one
(New for 2020: we’ve published a range of SQL Server interview candidate screening assessments with our partner Kandio, so you can avoid hiring an ‘expert’ who
During every one of our Immersion Events, we designate Thursday evening as 'open mic' night where anyone can do a 15-minute presentation on anything they
(Check out my Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions.) Back in April I kicked off a survey where I asked
(New for 2020: we’ve published a range of SQL Server interview candidate screening assessments with our partner Kandio, so you can avoid hiring an ‘expert’ who
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
The January edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column. This month's
Back at the start of July I kicked off a survey around your plans for SSDs (see here) and now I present the results to
Many times I'm asked whether having multiple data files can lead to an improvement in performance. The answer, as with all things SQL (except concerning
The March edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column. This month's
Christmas comes but once a year… really? Then mine just came early on this afternoon's UPS truck. The very nice folks at Fusion-io just sent
(Check out our Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Improving Storage Subsystem Performance.) A while ago I blogged about disk partition alignment, and how the default
(For the hardware setup I’m using, see this post.) As part of my new benchmarking series I first wanted to play around with different configurations of
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
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
In this week's survey I'd like to know how often you run consistency checks on your *most critical* production database, regardless of *how* you run
There are a couple of issues that I’ve heard of in the last few weeks (one while onsite at a customer) and I think they might bite
I've just been setting up some of our new hardware, and wanted to do some background reading to ensure I use the correct disk partition
This has come up a few times now, most recently in an email question this morning – subsequent runs of DBCC CHECKDB show varying numbers of
At the last few conferences I've presented at, there have been questions about using SSDs (Solid-State Drives) for enterprise storage and whether that will change
There are two pretty well-known I/O errors – 823, and 824 – but there’s also one called 825 which most DBAs do*not* know about, and
Every so often I’ll see posts on the various data corruption forums discussing causes of corruption. In this post I want to debunk some of
Many times I've been asked to do a blog post about creating Agent alerts, and given that today I demo'd it as part of our
This is a really interesting question that came up in the Microsoft Certified Architect class I’m teaching at present – if a database has torn-page
Here’s an issue that I thought was a one-off but it just popped up again over the weekend so I want to publicize it. DBA
There’s been a very interesting discussion going on over at SQLServerCentral.com about whether to create multiple files for a user database because the server has multiple
There’s a new whitepaper on TechNet that I’ve just come across (even though it was published 6 months ago!) called Predeployment I/O Best Practices. It’s
One of the hottest features in SQL Server 2005 is database mirroring, and it’s helped many companies implement successful and relatively inexpensive high-availability strategies. In
One of the comments I received recently is below: Hi Paul, If the corruption happens to be related to I/O Erros and there is nothing
This was originally posted as two posts on the SQL Server Storage Engine site. It was very popular so I’ve combined the two posts together
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