database

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…

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…

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…

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 can seem tempting to solve database performance issues with hardware. But consider this example: if CPU utilization shoots up to 90% on one of your servers and stays at that level for a day or two, is the problem lack of CPU power or something else?

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…