The Zombie PerfMon Counter That Never Dies! Quick Tip

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't Die One of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away.  (Some day, politicians will realize this.  We can easily fact check their consistency).  Because of longevity of content posted to the Internet, a lot of performance tuning topics become "zombies".  We shoot 'em in dead, but they keep coming back! In other words, those old recommendations were a suggested best practices for long ago, for a specific version of SQL Server, but are now … [Read more...]

Recap – SQL Saturday 151 in Orlando

It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays  were started by Andy Warren (Twitter | Blog).  On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server.  I also delivered a session on SQL Server Internals and Architecture to a totally packed house.  For those of you who emailed me directly, here's the link for the special SQL Sentry offer. I got to attend the extended events session by Jack Corbett (Twitter | Blog), middle in the photo above.  Good stuff, Jack!  Jack … [Read more...]

Secure Your Spot at the Nashville SQL Saturday!

PASS SQL Saturdays are free 1-day training events for IT professionals interested in Microsoft SQL Server, providing a variety of high-quality technical sessions, all happen through the efforts of local volunteers.  The leadership team of the local chapter of PASS here in Nashville (Facebook | LinkedIn) have worked hard to make this year's SQL Saturday a day of great training and networking. The local NashSQL leadership team includes yours truly (blog | twitter), Joe Webb (Twitter | Blog), Louis "Dr SQL" Davidson (Twitter | Blog), Christina Leo (blog | twitter), and Shelton Dickson … [Read more...]

Two New Slide Decks. Plus, the Week in Colorado.

I had the honor of traveling the great state of Colorado last week, speaking at the PASS chapters in Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Denver.  At all three events, we had a stellar attendance and, at least in Denver, broke all the records in recent memory both in terms of overall attendance and in first-timers.  Denver, in fact, was standing room only and had nearly 30 first time attendees.  Great news!  I also want to give a special shout-out of thanks and appreciation to Chris Shaw (Twitter | Blog) whose hard work and tenacity ensured that all of Colorado got to see me speak. From left to … [Read more...]

How is Microsoft IT using the Cloud?

Steve Balmer very publicly pronounced that Microsoft was “all in” for cloud computing and Windows Azure.  So that means Microsoft is using cloud for its internal IT as well as building products to utilize the cloud.  If you want to learn how Microsoft IT is using Windows Azure to move existing applications to the cloud and creating new applications for the cloud, click here: IT Showcase on Windows Azure.   Let me know what you think.  Accurate and informative? Or marketing fluff? Thanks, -Kevin Follow me on Twitter! … [Read more...]

New White Paper: SQL Server Extended Events and Notifications

Download the new white paper: How to Use SQL Server’s Extended Events and Notifications to Proactively Resolve Performance Issues SQL Server comes with a wide array of tools for monitoring your environment. There are logs and traces that provide information when errors occur, but these are often used passively to react to events that have already occurred.  There's PerfMon, and Profiler, and loads of Dynamic Management Views to check.  But where to look? As database administrators (DBA), we need to monitor our environments proactively and create solutions as issues arise. In this white … [Read more...]

Starting this week: Dublin, Maidenhead, and London

This might be most most overcommitted four-week period of time ever in my life.  I'm tired just thinking about it! Not only am I traveling internationally and speaking over the next few weeks, I'm also helping on two book projects, learning some new applications from Quest Software, and helping on a small Transact-SQL refactoring project. Swag on hand? I've got a special printing of 500 video training DVDs for this trip: SQL Server Training on DMVs Performance Monitor and Wait Events Plus, I'll have a few posters, stickers, and other goodies.  Come see me!   SQL Saturday … [Read more...]

Dev Advice: Make a Tiny Dev Database Act Like a HUGE Prod Database

Here's an evergreen question.  It's a question that never completely goes away.  But lately, I've been getting it a few times per week.  So I thought it's time to readdress the question, which usually takes some form of the following: I can't really do effective development on my little dev laptop because our production SQL Server database is 15 gazillionbytes, way too big for my workstation.  What's a uber-nerd to do?  Well, maybe they didn't use the word "uber-nerd".  But you get my drift, right?  The production database is really, really big - unmanageably big for keeping a local copy.  … [Read more...]

New on “Database Trends & Applications”

In last month's column, "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It," I described a number of major developments in the IT industry that are likely to disrupt the life of database professionals everywhere.  I categorize those four disruptors - virtualization, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSD), and advanced multi-core CPUs - into two broad groups.  I'm going to continue an analysis of these disruptive technologies in inverse order.  Today, let's discuss SSDs. [READ MORE ON DATABASE TRENDS & APPLICATIONS ] … [Read more...]

Microsoft Document Watch for Operational Excellence

Back when my day-to-day duties included database administration work and enterprise architecture, I became rather obsessed with the idea of operational excellence.  I read everything I could on the topic.  I made a list of favorites, which became somewhat shabby over time, as I dog-eared important pages and scribbled notes in the margins.  (Perhaps that list of favorites might, in and of itself, make a good blog post).  Fast-forward a decade and I'm still mightily interested in operational excellence for IT organizations.  It's just that so much good material is available for free on the … [Read more...]