Someday, we may look back on IT as a subset of social science as much as a technological discipline. Because it sits at the intersection of business and technology, visibility…
The Unifying Force of Data
Monitoring and Observability With USE and RED
Modern systems can emit thousands or millions of metrics, and modern monitoring tools can collect them all. Faced with such an abundance of data, it can be difficult to know…
VMDK versus RDM: Which One Do I Need for SQL Server?
When it comes to disk configuration options for virtualized servers running on VMware, you have two options: VMFS virtual file-based disk (VMDK) or a raw device mapping (RDM). Which one…
Hardware or Code? SQL Server Performance Examined
CPUs are running faster now than ever before, solid-state drives are replacing spinning disks, and database servers have terabytes of RAM. Because these resources are plentiful and increasingly affordable, it…
How to Recover the Master Database in SQL Server 2012
In my seven years as a production DBA, I can count on one hand the number of times I have need to restore the master database as a result of…
Connect to Windows Azure Virtual Machine Using SSMS
In 2013, Microsoft made it available for customers to utilize virtual machines running in Windows Azure. This allowed customers to run an on-premises version of SQL Server, but have the…
Changing Default Database File Locations in SQL Server
When you create a database in SQL Server and do not specify a file location for your data and log files, SQL Server will rely on the default locations as…
5 Things You Didn’t Know About SQL Agent
Microsoft SQL Server comes with a boatload of additional components. One component is the SQL Agent. The purpose of the SQL Agent is to serve as a job scheduler. Many…
What Happens if I Shrink a Database in Windows Azure?
At some point in your career as a data professional, you are going to fill up an entire drive with data. It is not a question of “if,” but a…
Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 3)
You can use the information in the SQL Server plan cache to research performance issues and investigate opportunities for performance improvement. In this three-part article series, we’ve examined several important…