We live in a hectic world of day-to-day operations and aggressive business requirements that must be facilitated and made possible by IT — often in a vacuum. And we do all this while being expected to keep operations running consistently, repeatedly, and without interruption. These are the challenges, and rightfully so, the woes, of the […]
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Retracing an intractable alert hairball today, I’m reminded of how critical, and often critically broken, alerting actually is in many environments. You can be a department of one with only a handful of systems sending occasional advisory messages, or a large IT team with hundreds of alerts of every variety, and you have the same […]
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No more shooting from the hip This week, I’ll take you through troubleshooting, a skill that allows admins to drill down into an incident to gain understanding about its underlying cause and any related effects. Last week, I went over remediation, describing it as the skill that allows virtualization admins to keep their jobs. If […]
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Fix It Now: It’s how you keep your job Last week, I covered alerting as a skill that allows virtualization admins to quickly surface information about potential or likely incidents. In theory, what is surfaced is the single point of truth. But an ugly fact of reality is that no matter how good your alerting […]
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One of the aspects of monitoring that IT professionals (and monitoring software developers in particular) think about a lot is “throttling.” How do you control the flow of data entering the system? How do you manage that same data once it’s been processed and needs to be logged in the database? How do you […]
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You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know Last week, I provided an explanation of virtualization that even your grandmother could relate to and understand. I also listed a set of skills that were imperative to any virtualization admin’s long-term career success: discovery, alerting, remediation, and troubleshooting. This week I’ll cover what we mean when we […]
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Running multiple SQL Server and Oracle database platforms to support different applications is the norm for many IT organizations today. While in many cases the two different database platforms often operate as independent islands there are also times you might need to integrate the two database platforms to perform lookups, queries and other operations that […]
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Maintenance plans are one of the hidden jewels in the SQL Server tool chest that can really be a godsend to the beginning DBA or accidental DBA that is tasked to manage SQL Server. Maintenance Plans enable you to quickly and easily create scheduled backups, database integrity checks, index reorganizations and more – most of […]
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Like most Microsoft products, sometimes the licensing can be more difficult to figure out than the technical aspects of the product, and SQL Server is no different. Each SQL Server edition has a different licensing model and some have more than one. There are multiple different license types. And if that’s not enough there are […]
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There are many myths and incorrect information shared online about the SQL Server table variable, and it would be easy for a SQL Server developer to assume that, based on the misinformation, using a table variable instead of a temporary table was a good idea. Using table variable is in fact easy, but there are things a developer should […]
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Before we dig into the lesser known but important facts, I want to provide little background about the SQL Server Columnstore index. This feature was introduced in SQL Server 2012, but remains largely unknown. As the name suggests, a data page will store values only for the given column to which that page is allocated. Generally, […]
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When asked about common errors encountered in a SQL Server environment, you might expect to hear about high CPU issues, but in reality, these are rare and few. In fact, many DBAs report connectivity issues with SQL Server as among the most frequently encountered errors. These errors can further be classified into two sub-categories: Login request not reaching SQL Server. Login request reaching SQL […]
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