Why Windows Azure SQL Database May Be Right For You

Why Windows Azure SQL Database May Be Right For You

Grande. Bold. No room. It’s my standard order when at Starbucks. Despite there being thousands of ways to have my coffee prepared I prefer the simplest. It’s probably why I enjoy working with Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) so much. The number of configuration options we have with WASD is limited. By limiting the options … Read more

Top 3 Performance Killers For Linked Server Queries

Top 3 Performance Killers For Linked Server Queries

One thing I have noticed in all my years as a data professional: few users understand (or care) how far away they are from their data. Quite often they expect instant results from their queries. They don’t understand the upper bounds of resources like network bandwidth, the speed of light, and that the data is … Read more

Doing It Wrong: Virtualizing SQL Server

Doing It Wrong: Virtualizing SQL Server

I’ve been involved in a virtualization projects for almost ten years now. In that time I’ve had the opportunity to track my own list of “best practice” items. It’s a list I share freely with clients and customers that seek me out for virtualization advice. I can tell that virtualization (and Cloud) efforts are on … Read more

SQL Server Query Performance Tuning: A 12 Step Program

Performance tuning is hard. Everyone knows that. Has anyone ever tried to figure out why? Sure, there’s that big old “it depends” that gets tossed about. Look, at the end of the day you only have so many possible resource bottlenecks: disk, memory, CPU, and network. I don’t care if you are running Linux, Unix, … Read more

Slides From Reno SQL Server User Group Available

Well, I finally joined Slideshare. Here are the slides from my most recent presentation (Database Design, Size DOES Matter!) to the SQL Server User Group in Reno, Nevada last week: I’m going to see about pushing many of my presentations to Slideshare in the coming months. I like the idea of Slideshare, just not sure … Read more