When I walked into the welcome reception at the 2014 PASS Summit in Seattle last year, I have to tell you that I was a little verklempt. I had a moment of "My baby has all grown up!" The event was so packed with people, so well executed, and so flashy. Thomas LaRock (b | t), the current president, and the rest of the board of directors have simply done a fantastic job growing and leading the organization. Comparing the 2014 Summit to the original 1999 Summit in the conference space of the Chicago Sheraton that cold September was quite a bit like seeing your little daughter coming down the … [Read more...]

Delayed durability was announced late in the SQL Server 2014 development cycle, but offers something that many SQL Server professionals have wanted for years—the ability to disable transaction logging. Why turn off the transaction log? It is the main guarantor of transactional consistency in SQL Server and is critical for highly recoverable applications, after all. That answer, in itself, tells you about situations where you might like to turn off the transaction log. That is, you can accelerate performance in a lot of situations where you do NOT need transactional consistency. DEFAULT … [Read more...]

This month's edition of T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Tracy McKibben (T|B). I was challenged by Aaron Bertrand (T|B) to participate in this T-SQL Tuesday. I instantly knew what and who I wanted to write about, but my schedule being what it is prevented me from writing the blog entry until straight up at midnight. (Originally published at http://wp.me/p3rOiF-1CY). Since this installment of T-SQL Tuesday happens to fall on Ada Lovelace Day, Tracy tells us that our mission – should we choose to accept it – is as follows: Ada Lovelace has been an inspiration to many. In keeping with my blog … [Read more...]

I just got finished reading a great blog post from my buddy, Thomas LaRock (t | b), in which he describes a useful personal policy he used to track changes made to his SQL Servers when installing third-party products. Note that I'm talking about line-of-business applications here - your inventory management systems and help desk ticketing apps. I'm not talking about monitoring and tuning applications since they, by their very nature, need a different sort of access to your back-end server resources. (Full disclosure: both Tom and I currently work for different tools vendors. But we're both … [Read more...]

I was recently chatting with the current President of PASS, Thomas LaRock (Twitter | Blog), and Pieter Vanhove (Twitter | Blog), a prominent SQL Server consultant and expert in Belgium, about how I go about building and presenting a full-day technical seminar. In the SQL Server world, we tend to call these "pre-cons", as in pre-conference seminar, because they're typically offered as paid add-ons occurring prior to a full technical conference. We call them that even when they come at the end of the conference and, heck, when there's no conference at all. Kevin and Kendal Van Dyke … [Read more...]

The first big mistake I made as a DBA was coming to work with my zipper wide open. But I digress. Hear one of my most popular session via streaming media at SQLSentry.TV! Microsoft SQL Server is easier to administrate than any other relational database on the market.  But “easier than everyone else” doesn’t mean it’s easy.  And it doesn’t mean that database administration on SQL Server is problem free.  And since SQL Server is constantly growing from small, home-grown applications, many IT professionals end up encountering issues that others had tackled and solved years ago.  Why … [Read more...]

Uh oh! So you're plugging along in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) when it suddenly goes belly up. Now you're staring at various dialog boxes telling you that SSMS crashed. Usually the first dialog box you get will ask you if you'd like to close OR the program. If you choose to close the program, you'll be presented with the opportunity to recover your lost SQL scripts once you reopen SSMS, as shown above.  (Image above courtesy of Aalam Rangi). But let's say that closing the program represents a big issue for you due to lost time, productivity, etc. You want to go the other route - … [Read more...]

A big "Thank You!!!" goes to my boss, Greg Gonzalez, for choosing to have one of our big corporate events at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, the HQ of NASCAR. In addition to that, he paid for us to get a chance to ride in a real NASCAR racer with 687 horsepower.  My driver took us up to nearly 150 MPH. Let me tell you, this speed is INSANE. It was like riding the high-speed launch of a roller coaster for 5 minutes.  And it was AWESOME in the truest sense of the word.  I really was filled with awe. It cost a little more than $100 which, in my mind, was a price well worth … [Read more...]