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 […]
Children at Technical Conferences Part II
Nearly 10 years ago I wrote a blog post about having my son tag along at various conferences I was speaking at. So much has changed in the past ten years and thankfully I’ve been able to bring my entire family along on various other trips. I was reminded by a Facebook memory about a […]
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Error
I came across an issue with SSMS not loading properly recently. Regardless of launching from the start menu with or without administrator, SSMS would error out. Due to this error, I also could not uninstall SSMS to try a repair. After much trial and error and Google/Bing searches I was able to correct the issue […]
SQL Server 2022 is Here!
SQL Server 2022 becoming generally available was announced on Nov 16th 2022. This is the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet, which is pretty exciting. A major Azure-enabled feature is the ability to leverage Azure SQL Managed Instance for disaster recovery, which also means we can backup and restore from Azure SQL Managed Instance […]
SSRS Management for the DBA
Things a DBA should know about SSRS
Common Issues with SQL Server Backups
I absolutely love talking about SQL Server backup and restores. It is one of my favorite sessions to give at user groups and conferences all over the world. I’ve also written a couple of books on the topic. Over the many years of working with Microsoft SQL Server, I tend to see the same mistakes […]
SQL Server Partitioning for Performance
Often enough I get questions regarding partitioning to try to help alleviate performance issues with very large tables. A common misconception is that due to the table being large, when queries are run against it and SQL Server has to read the entire table, if you partition the table, SQL Server will read less data. […]