/ Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock

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Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock is a Head Geek™ at SolarWinds and a Microsoft® Certified Master, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, VMware® vExpert, and former Microsoft Certified Trainer. He has over 20 years’ experience in the IT industry as a programmer, developer, analyst, and database administrator. LaRock has spent much of his career focused on data and database administration, which led to his being chosen as a Technical Evangelist for Confio Software in 2010, where his research and experience helped to create the initial versions of the software now known as SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer. LaRock has served on the board of directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server® (PASS), and is an avid blogger, author, and technical reviewer for numerous books about SQL Server management. He now focuses on working with customers to help resolve problems and answer questions regarding database performance tuning and virtualization for SQL Server, Oracle®, MySQL®, SAP®, and DB2®. He’s made it his mission to give IT and data professionals longer weekends.

The Latest Posts Featuring Thomas LaRock

Performance Counters for Database Mirroring
December 19, 2012
Database
We have customers using database mirroring, so I wanted to take some time to write a quick post regarding database mirroring and performance monitoring. Microsoft has published an article titled…
Performance Tuning and Time Invested
December 17, 2012
Database
I never cared for the phrase “wasted time” when it comes to something like performance tuning. Sure, we all feel that way, especially when we spend hours on something only…
Have You Made These 5 Database Design Mistakes?
November 15, 2012
Database
Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support costs.…
SQL Server CXPacket Wait Type
November 13, 2012
Database
When are CXPACKET waits a problem? Note: This article, by Thomas LaRock, was posted 8/19/2013 and supercedes the previous version. This update has been made in response to comments made on the original article…
SQL Server fn_dblog() Function Details and Example
November 12, 2012
Database
The fn_dblog() function (formerly known as the DBCC command) is one of several undocumented functions for SQL Server. It allows you to view the transaction log records in the active…
SQL Server ASYNC Network IO Wait Type
November 8, 2012
Database
THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RECENTLY UPDATED AND CONTAINS NEW, TECHNICAL INFORMATION Note: For SQL2000 this wait is called NETWORKIO. The ASYNC_NETWORK_IO wait indicates that one of two scenarios are happening.…
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