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A major Health Department was running a data system that has been expanding over the years. Eventually, they ended up with a highly outdated and inefficient environment with thousands of Microsoft Access and SQL Server databases. Such an outdated system presents a number of risks such as performance, scalability, manageability, security issues and frequent database corruptions. This leads to revenue losses because of poor performance. Moreover, such environments are usually not cost-effective with increased operating expenses due to a great […]

Thanks to everyone who attended! You can get the slides and demo files here: Webinar 1.3 — Metadata Internals If you missed the session, and/or would like to watch the recorded version, you can get a link to the recording here. Related posts Why Learn About SQL Server Internals? Webinar #1.1 SQL Server Metadata Overview Follow-up Webinar #2.1 Follow-up (Episode 4) Webinar 2.9 Followup (Episode 12 – Columnstore Indexes)

The first event on my Fall tour is behind me now. I had a wonderful time at SQL Saturday Holland. A couple of great questions came up that should lead to blog posts soon! Slides and scripts can now be downloaded: Locking Session Statistics Session

I’m taking off tomorrow for a three-and-a-half-week adventure, representing DB Best Technologies in four different countries. In addition to some customer visits, and a week’s vacation with my daughter and grandson in Stuttgart, I’ll be presenting at the following four PUBLIC events.

Thanks to everyone who attended! You can get the slides and demo files here: Webinar 1.2 — SQLServer DMVs files If you missed the session, or would like to watch the recorded version, here’s the link. (Once you complete the registration information, you will get an email with a link to the webinar. Yes, it’s a little tedious, but the marketing team says I have to use this link.) Following are solutions to the homework exercises for Webinar 1.2:

The link to watch Webinar #1.1: Metadata Overview can be found here: Webinar #1 – SQL Server Metadata Overview Once you complete the registration information, you will get an email with a link to the webinar. Yes, it’s a little tedious, but the marketing team says I have to use this link. 🙂 The zip file that includes the presentation and demo scripts is located at Webinar 1.1 — SQL Server Metadata Overview files. As I mentioned when telling you […]

   This past Tuesday, the 19th of September, I started broadcasting a series of webinars which cover all the material in my SQL Server Internals classes that I’ve been delivering around the world for almost 20 years. I’ll even be able to add additional information not included in the classes because our time constraints are not quite so strict. As Microsoft added new features to the SQL Server product, I had to remove some still relevant content […]

Before SQL Server 2016, configuration referred to instance-wide settings. But with Azure SQL Database not giving us access to any instance-level information or giving us any instance-level control, we only can see information and control settings for a specific database. So now, a new SQL Server 2016 feature allows us to have a bit more control of individual databases. And once a feature gets tested and verified in Azure, it’s ported to the SQL Server on-premises code. We now have […]

One of the largest transportation authorities was running the mission-critical system on SQL Server platform and any down times could harmfully affect on their business. So, they decided to modernize their system and implement high availability and disaster recovery solutions to keep their system running without interruptions. To meet the customer’s needs, we performed technical support and delivered detailed instructions and automated scripts to implement the highly available architecture in compliance with Always On Availability Group checklist. Our solution allowed the […]

Long ago (in SQL Server years) many metadata changes were implemented with special one-off stored procedures. For example, we had sp_addindex and sp_dropindex, as well as sp_addtype, sp_droptype, sp_addlogin and sp_droplogin. For changing certain database properties, we had sp_changedbowner and sp_dbcmptlevel, to name a few. Gradually, Microsoft has started replacing these procedures with the more generic DDL commands ADD, DROP and ALTER. This is both good news and bad news. It’s good because these commands are more efficient and more […]