The Santa Cruz Experiment: Why You Should Care About Big Data

[This was first posted to Technorati on February 6th, 2012. You can read the original here.] I keep hearing the term “Big Data”. My old-school IT instincts always makes me think of inefficiently storing two-letter state abbreviation codes inside of an nvarchar(50) field because that’s the default data type you get when creating a database table … Read more

SQL 2012 Database Engine Tuning Advisor: Now With More Plan Cache!

I’m normally not one to advocate the use of the Database Engine Tuning Advisor (DETA), a tool available inside of Microsoft SQL Server. (To be fair, I’m not a fan of the SQL Tuning Advisor from Oracle, either.) But I recently came across a little nugget of information that I wanted to share with you regarding … Read more

Presenting at Tech-Ed(s) This Year

The announcements came out yesterday and I can now tell the world that I will be presenting at TechEd this year. Denny Cherry (blog | @mrdenny) and I will be doing a precon seminar at TechEd in Orlando in June. The title is “Microsoft SQL Server Performance Tuning and Optimization” and we are very excited to have … Read more

What Causes Deadlocks?

Application code, that’s what causes deadlocks. Well, perhaps a combination of application code on top of database design, and access patterns, and transaction isolation levels, and… OK, here’s the point I need to make clear: the database engine does not suddenly seize up and start deadlocking transactions arbitrarily because it is tired one day. No, certain … Read more