Each year, I try to find a good book to bring with me to the beach. A few months ago, I came across Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World while doom scrolling Twitter one night. I ordered the book and did not wait for the beach to get started reading. Written … Read more
Ask three DBAs about their preferred performance tuning methodology and you will get back seven distinct answers.
As an admin, you often get requests from developers asking for elevated permissions on servers and systems. Inside of SQL Server, this is called ‘sysadmin‘ access. As you can imagine, it is not a good idea to give this level of access to just anyone. I thought I would write a post to help you … Read more
This past week I received another care package from Satya Nadella. Inside was my Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for 2020-2021. I am happy, honored, and humbled to receive the Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for the twelfth straight year. I still recall my first MVP award and how it got caught in the company … Read more
There are many methods available for optimizing the performance of SQL Server. One method in particular is examining your plan cache, looking for query plan warnings. Plan warnings include implicit conversions, key or RID lookups, and missing indexes to name a few. Each of these warnings is the optimizer giving you the opportunity to take … Read more
I’ve written before about using sqlmap to perform sql injection testing against a website. It is also possible to use sqlmap to connect directly against a database. In this post I will show you how to use sqlmap to connect directly to Azure SQL Database. Once connected you can enumerate objects, open a shell, or … Read more
