The voice on the other end of the line was concerned. It would appear that their server was having memory issues. But they already knew the answer, the memory issues were ‘expected’ due to the fact that they were running Microsoft SQL Server. “SQL Server is a memory hog, it uses all that the server has!” … Read more
Nobody starts a database project with failure in mind. And yet, it would seem as if the majority of all such projects end up with some degree of failure. Oh sure, some are small failures, like the design didn’t last the full seven years as promised. Other failures are more stunning in their glory; I’ve … Read more
Quick question: Where would you go to find some basil in your local grocery store? Did you say “by the other herbs?” Or did you say “by the tomatoes?” If you are like me, then you would go looking for basil by the other herbs because, well, that is a natural, logical grouping of products. … Read more
I’ve written before about how much I love looking for outliers. One example of this can be found in the post I did on the sysjobhistory table. Recently I was asked to put together some code to find out which backups were “running long”. Of course my first question was trying to define what was … Read more
You have no idea that what you are not doing is causing you pain. Then again, how could you know this? I mean, if you are not doing it, why would you ever think that your inaction could be the very thing that is causing you heartache every time your phone rings in the middle … Read more
No matter what our profession, we all have our favorite set of tools to help us get the job done. Database Administrators will have a set of scripts that we use in order to gain insight into the server instances under our care. I often see beginner DBAs look to the counters provided by Perfmon (AKA, the Resource and … Read more
