You’re doing it wrong. You didn’t mean to be that way, I know. But the truth is things happen. When they do I am brought in to find out what is happening, what has gone wrong. I see repeating patterns in the database issues I am asked to investigate. I keep track of them as I … Read more
“Trust [everyone], but always cut the deck.” – Gerald Weinberg Whenever I come across a piece of technical information on the internet I try to remember two things. The first is assume good intentions. The second is trust, but verify. In other words, don’t assume that the person sharing the information is doing so for any other … Read more
I wanted to take a moment to point out this VMWare KB article I came across recently. I really do love how the KB article points out the need for accurate disk configurations. I often see misconfigured disks resulting in a performance bottleneck for a virtualized environment. So that part of the KB was great for me to see … Read more
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
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
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
