“If you can’t tell a table from a view you need to try harder”. That quote is from Karen López (blog | @datachick), and she often makes the comment in reference to my advocating the use of prefixes in object names. My reason for wanting to use prefixes is simple enough: I want to know if I … Read more
If your house were on fire who would you call? Would you call the architect first? Or would you call the fire department? Of course you would. Yet when your application performance is so poor as to be unusable, who do you call first? The architect? No! You call the database administrator. We’re the ones to … Read more
How well do you know your data? I’m not talking about user names, passwords, or credit card numbers. I don’t expect you to know the values stored inside the rows and tables of your database (although I *was* once called out for not knowing such details so apparently there are some people out there that … Read more
Recently I shared a piece of code that would help you to right size the datatypes inside of a database. I’ve received a lot of feedback since that post and it has spurred me to think a little bit deeper on the topic of datatypes and performance. The script I shared only examined whats are … Read more
Last Wednesday I delivered a webinar for Confio titled “Database Design: Size DOES Matter”. I had a piece of code at the end that evaluated defined datatypes to the current data values in those columns. The idea being that if a column is defined as BIGINT but contains values that are best defined as a … Read more
The recording of my recent webinar for Confio has been made available and you can go here to register to watch (registration required, but it is FREE). Here is the abstract: “Great database performance starts with great database design. During the design process it is important to select your SQL Server datatypes wisely. Failure to do … Read more
