Blog

A global pharmaceutical company has been supporting hundreds of applications on the Oracle platform. Their complex system became outdated over the years with 90% of end of life or extended support Oracle versions with very expensive contracts. They needed a cost effective solution, so they looked for a way to move their workloads to a higher value SQL Server solution. See how we helped our customer determine Oracle migration ROI (Return on Investment) for their highly complex environment. Let’s see how […]

We’re happy to announce the latest release of DB Best Database Compare Suite. The new version marked 4.11 brings support for Vertica Analytics Platform. Learn more about the ultimate DBA tool and discover the major updates implemented in the latest release from our blog post.

DB Best will be hosting a series of FREE workshops in the Midwest region with Kalen Delaney presenting. The workshops will focus on ‘Getting the most out of the SQL Server Engine”. Kalen Delaney is a SQL Server MVP, renowned author of the SQL Server Internals book series. With over two decades of SQL Server experience, Kalen has been a frequent speaker and authority on all things SQL Server. The workshops will include extensive Hands On Lab sections facilitated by […]

Even though Harvey’s impact will be felt mainly in Texas, it has been having a big effect on my life here in the Beautiful Pacific Northwest today. I was planning on traveling to Houston next Monday, the 28th, and then on to Austin and Dallas, for a series of workshops, which I was calling my Texas Tour. The worst of the storm might be over by Monday, but I am well aware of potential flooding problems in Houston post-storm. And […]

DB Best recently completed a project to migrate Sybase ASE databases to SQL Server for a global leader in security technology. Faced with skyrocketing license costs with SAP to renew their out-of-support server instances, our customer needed a way to migrate hundreds of Sybase ASE databases. To make matters worse, our customer faced upgrading their out of support PowerBuilder applications. By migrating to SQL Server on commodity Intel based servers, our customer found that they could exceed their performance needs […]

One of our clients was looking to create a new business model of selling digital art using an augmented reality art mobile app solution. They identified that the biggest roadblock to selling digital art was that a customer often returned the art piece because it didn’t look right in their home or place of business. We developed the Art for Places and Spaces AFPAS application which allows customers to explore how a certain piece of artwork looks in the intended room […]

One of our public sector customers was using a distributed SQL Server 2016 database system and was considering an upgrade to unite the servers in one data center, or even a move to the cloud. We helped them by using our DBMSys service to perform the overall database health check. As part of the database health check, we found several high priority issues which required immediate actions. In addition, we provided the customer with detailed information on their existing database system, […]

Over the next month, I’ll be presenting a free workshop in seven cities in the U.S. The workshop will include hands-on labs that allow you to explore new features of the relational engine for both SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server 2017.  For more details, and to register, check the links below. Remember, the workshops are FREE and include both breakfast and lunch!

Last week I had a terrific opportunity to give a few SQL Server presentations in the Washington, DC area. I stayed in Reston, Virginia, and spoke at the Microsoft office in Chevy Chase, Maryland. On Tuesday evening I was able to take the metro into DC itself and spend several beautiful hours walking around the National Mall.

As I promised a couple of weeks ago, this post will show you how to look inside a page to see what is actually stored there. I’ll just be looking at data pages, and only a very basic example, just so you get the idea. But once you get familiar with looking inside pages, there are many mysteries about SQL Server data storage that you can solve on your own. I’ll mention a few of them at the end of […]