Are you an impatient DBA? Does it make you crazy to have to mouse around the SQL Server Management Studio dashboard? Wouldn’t it be nice to know the keyboard shortcuts that can make you go faster?
Back in “the day” we knew that REAL computer people use a keyboard, not a mouse. Mice were for those Apple folk…
Some Background SQL Server ensures that all changes to the database, either data or structures such as indexes, are preserved by first writing to the transaction log file, than then writing to the physical database. SQL Server only uses one transaction log per database at a single point in time. It starts writing copies of […]
Dan Crisan, @dandancrisan, a full-time student and tech blogger, has stumbled upon a great way to learn new material — and that’s to write about it. He did just that, taking the material from his Intro to Database Systems course and crafting it into a series of postings called “A Tiny Intro to Database Systems”, […]
Data compression is a technology that’s been around since SQL Server 2008. The idea of data compression is that you can selectively choose tables, indexes, or partitions within a database and shrink the amount of space used to store the data. Now, before you get too excited about this scalability and performance feature, at the […]
I have a bone to pick with Microsoft. I’m not a Windows Systems Admin, and I don’t think I should have to be in order to use a Windows operating system. I’ll tell my story, and you decide if sysadmin certification is a pre-req to using – in this case – Windows 7. Lately I’ve […]
SQL Server 2014 is a new breed of workhorse in the Microsoft stables. Last week I attended a webcast given by Mike Otey, Senior Consultant for SQL Server Pro magazine and President of TECA Inc., in which he highlights the amazing new and improved features offered by the Enterprise Edition of 2014. If you haven’t […]
Making the jump from SQL Server 2000 to 2014 — this was an unexpected journey, not for me, but for my client. For nearly 15 years they’d been using SQL Server 2000 as their main production system, and they were happy to do so. Not much changed in their business model, and the database […]
Some years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine entitled “SQL by Design: Why You Need Database Normalization”. At that time, NoSQL databases were a tiny percentage of the installations, and relational ruled the land. Today the landscape has changed, and we have relational database management systems like SQL Server sharing the spotlight with […]
Tempdb performance tuning can be an art unto itself. We probably all know the standard stuff: put tempdb on separate disks if you’re still working with direct attached storage — on it’s own spindle if at all possible, and fastest one(s) you have. If you can, put the tempdb data file on one disk and […]
Today’s posting is for those BIG DATA dudes and dudettes, and those folks who are starting to assemble big data stores, who are faced with issues of how to wrangle database design and data modeling in their big data world. If you’ve been a follower of the SQLmag for any length of time, […]