Plays Well With Others – Metrics to the Max!

November 2009 would have been the 100th birthday of famed management guru, Peter Drucker, were he alive today.  Now for those of you who don’t know the name, Peter Drucker was no mere guru or simple pundit.  He was in fact the father of management and universally acclaimed as the world’s greatest management thinker.  Anyone who’s taken a business class, studied for an MBA, or had to deal with an IT project to build a management dashboard has been touched by Peter Drucker.  If you have a spare moment, add Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation to your library. Drucker came upon the scene at a … [Read more...]

Video: SQL Performance Optimization

Gain insight into best practices for SQL Server optimization and ways to alleviate many root causes that can impact performance of your SQL Server database. Kevin also will discuss how to manage for planned and unplanned changes, speed time to implementation of your applications and ensure that your databases are running as they should. You will learn how to: * Identify the root cause of bottlenecks that hinder performance of your SQL Server environment * Diagnose and fix T-SQL errors in development before code goes into production * Learn new best practices for project planning and … [Read more...]

DBTA: The Big Keep Getting Bigger

In this season of recession and financial meltdowns, a common question seems to be, "How big is ‘too big to fail'?" Titans of the financial industry made big bets with lots of risk and, when they didn't pan out, American society overall has to pay the price.  But, that aside, the very scale of our financial system, by just about every metric, has reached amazing heights, be that number of financial transactions per second, number of traders, number of funds traded, amount of money changing hands—you name it. [READ MORE] … [Read more...]

Videos: Strategies for Addressing Common SQL Server Challenges

As a busy SQL Server DBA you face an increasing number of daily challenges: Managing fast growing data volumes and database environments Diagnosing and resolving performance issues Effective backup and recovery Monitoring and tracking database changes Balancing current resources against future capacity needs Inefficiencies in any of these areas can lead to performance degradation, unauthorized database changes, and unplanned, extended downtime. Webcast originally presented by renowned SQL Server expert Kevin Kline and learn valuable strategies for addressing these challenges … [Read more...]

Plays Well With Others – Successful Directors versus Successful Technologists

The skills that enable a person to be a top-tier database professional have very little to do with being a successful member of a board of directors. So what skills are needed for a person to be successful on a board of directors for any large organization?  Here are a handful of skills, in no particular order, that I’ve seen demonstrated by very successful directors from days past: Strategic thinking Let’s face it - technology is detail-oriented work.  No database professional can be truly effective at their job if they never get the parameters correct when calling a function, can’t … [Read more...]

Video: SQL Server Disk Optimization

Since the release of SQL Server 2005, companies have been investing heavily in SQL Server for their business-critical applications. DBAs are now challenged with supporting ever-growing datasets and making efficient use of allocated disk space in both production and enterprise storage environments. Yet DBAs seldom have a clear picture of their data storage and therefore cannot determine whether they are getting a worthwhile return on their storage investment or if an out-of-disk situation is looming. In this presentation, Kevin will address these challenges and explore methodologies to help … [Read more...]

Video: Maximize SQL Server Performance with SQL Tuning

This presentation is a bit old, but largely still applicable.  It will help you understand Microsoft tuning techniques. It will teach tips and tricks for making queries perform better, and how to use tools to tune SQL. Posted March 27, 2007. … [Read more...]

Plays Well With Others – Hiring, Part 3

Fit and Finish Considering how expensive it is to bring on new people into your organization, it really pays dividends to make sure that any new hire is both a good fit for the technical requirements of the job as well as a good fit for the overall culture of the team and organization overall.  In part 1 of this series, we talked about the groundwork needed to effectively bring in a new hire.  Like database and application design, a little extra preparation in the beginning can save you a lot of heartache later in the process.  In part 2 of the series, we talked about various styles of … [Read more...]

Video: The Growing SQL Server World- Surviving the Data Avalanche

An expert roundtable discussion hosted by SQL Server Expert Kevin Kline and featuring speakers from Microsoft, EMC, Avanade, HP and Quest Software. With the release of SQL Server 2005 and its focus on Business Intelligence, SQL Server professionals are faced with unprecedented amounts of data to manage. How are you dealing with the flood of data? At the PASS Community Summit 2006, experts from Quest Software joined forces with a variety of other SQL Server industry experts for a panel discussion around the implications of managing large volumes of business critical data on SQL Server and … [Read more...]

DBTA: The Trouble with Third-Party Applications

Third-party applications are a very important part of the IT landscape. Many of us have faced the common dilemma of trying to decide whether to build or buy that next important application our organizations need. (By the way, I'm talking about smaller, specialized applications like an inventory management system for the company warehouse, or a practice management system for a doctor's office. I'm not talking about the huge and incredibly sophisticated ERP systems like SAP and Oracle Financials.) [READ MORE] … [Read more...]