“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
Last year I did a series on the system tables inside of SQL Server, which included this post on the sysjobhistory table in the msdb database. As much as I like (and use) that code from time to time to help people find the outliers with regards to long running jobs, something always nagged me … 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
The other day I wrote about the ten things I hate when interviewing someone. Today I will turn the tables and talk a bit about the things I don’t like to see as an interviewee. I’ve been involved in evaluating talent and interviewing others for over twenty years. I’ve also been on the other side … 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
