As a data professional, you’ll often get a phone call, email, or trouble ticket that says “SQL Server is slow, my query is slow, or things are slow”. This is the dreadful comment that we all receive from time to time and it never provides any detail of ‘what’ is slow. Where do you start […]
Category: SQL Tuning
Risk with Not Patching and Upgrading SQL Server
Working with SQL Server over the past 25 years for various organizations all over the world, I usually always find a database server that is well outside of support. I’d be willing to be that anyone reading this blog post in 2024 knows of a SQL 2000 or SQL 2005 instance out there. I hear […]
SQL Server Recovery Models
When I review customers database environments, I always check to see what the recovery model is for their databases and review that with the customer. I often times have to explain the three recovery models and what they are used for. Simple, Full, and Bulk-Logged. The recovery model that you select will determine how transaction […]
Are You Protected from Ransomware
There have been many organizations that have become victims of ransomware over the years. Occasionally we hear about some high-profile cases in the news. Most every case I’ve read about could have been easily prevented, while a few were much more sophisticated in nature. What are some steps that you or your organization can take […]
SQL Server Patching
Why should you patch your SQL Server instances? Compliance, stability, security, reliability, functionality, and more. Microsoft regularly releases updates to SQL Server known as Cumulative Updates (CUs). Cumulative updates often contain security updates that address vulnerabilities in additional to performance and reliability improvements to SQL Server. There are also bug fixes that are often included […]
Why Aren’t You Monitoring SQL Server
I repeat the phrase “If you aren’t monitoring it, you can’t measure it” all the time. Through my IT career, this has been a constant. If you don’t have a baseline or know what normal looks like, then how can you quantify what isn’t normal when a user starts complaining of performance issues. For SQL […]
Stop Using Balanced Power with SQL Server
The OS default Power Plan for Windows is Balanced Power. This can cause degraded overall performance for SQL Server. Balanced Power is a great concept to help conserve energy by scaling the processor performance based on current CPU utilization, however it isn’t conducive to SQL Server workloads. For SQL Server, I always ask organizations to […]
Reasons Why SQL Servers Don’t Get Configured to Industry Best Practices
Throughout my career, I’ve worked on a LOT of different SQL Servers. Many that were installed and configured by application administrators, developers, vendors, and data professionals. I’ve seen servers with straight defaults and others with various industry accepted best practices applied. One of my favorite sessions I present is “Common SQL Server Mistakes and How […]