Are you a DBA and just inherited a SQL Server or Oracle database? Are you migrating from one or the other? I’ve decided to start a series comparing these two RDBMS giants and the first topic is date formatting.
Tag: Development
Learning through gaming a SQL Server tale
I’ve been teaching my 17 yr old SQL Server and other various topics. I have quite a bit of experience training technology and speaking but it never fails; after about 5 minutes his eyes glaze over and he nods and “umhums” and then starts checking his phone.
DBA 101: Tuning lookups
Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics and indexing is always a great topic. SQL Server has a wide variety of indexes; but, today we’re going classic and talking about Non-clustered indexes.
Query tuning 101: What’s a probe residual?
Query tuning is an important process that will probably never go away and sharpening your tuning skills is always a good idea.
I’ve spoken on this topic many times and talked about probe residuals before. Mostly at SQL Saturday events and for some online webinars.
DBA 101: Comparing two SQL plans
Simple post today: How to compare two plans in SSMS.
This task is a task that is often done by a DBA or developer who is wanting to compare changes of an index or perhaps even comparing queries between DEV and PROD.
DBA 101: Unique Constraint vs Unique Index
Designing a rock solid application and database can be difficult. New features and overlapping features mean that you’re able to accomplish a single task in many ways. For instance the numeric and decimal data types. Which should you use?Read More »
DBA 101: What you may be missing with “Missing indexes”
If you’ve read my blog, I’m sure by now you know that I have no love for GUI tools. I will say they are improving every day and maybe, just maybe, we will see the day when you can click happily away and do everything you want. Sadly, this is not the day.
A while back, SSMS added the “Missing Index” data to the graphical query plan. They even made it really easy to add.
DBA 101: Altering a column
People always ask me what tools I use. Mostly this question comes from the topic of monitoring. I can honestly say that I don’t love any tools and you shouldn’t either.
My time at Microsoft placed me at nearly 300 different clients. As a Microsoft employee I never liked saying, “Go grab this tool so we can look at your problem because SSMS isn’t good enough.”
Query tuning 101: Non-trusted Foreign Keys
Foreign keys are an interesting feature of relational databases. They help enforce data integrity, sometimes help improve performance by eliminating joins, and sometimes slow down DML operations (inserts, updates, and deletes).
Using Memory Optimized tables for reporting
I recently worked on a project for fraud. This project needed to relate 67 million accounts to one another “Kevin Bacon” style. This means that each unique account may tie to another account on ssn, email, home phone, business phone, or any other PII type metric.
