Tim’s first ever Pluralsight course has been published  SQL Server: Consolidation Tactics and Best Practices  and is just over two hours long. It consolidates (ha!) all of Tims knowledge and experience from managing major consolidation projects over the years, as well as client experience from the SQLskills team. The modules are: Introduction General Considerations Consolidation Candidates Large Single [&]

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Erin’s new course is called SQL Server: Replacing Profiler with Extended Events and is just under 2.5 hours long. Its based on her very popular user group/conference session and will help you move painlessly from using Profiler to using Extended Events  as Extended Events are the only way to monitor all features added in SQL Server 2012 [&]

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Theres a persistent myth that you cannot upgrade a database to a version more that is more then two versions newer. Its not true. You can backup+restore (safest way) or detach+attach (not a safe way) from SQL Server 2005 (or higher) to any other newer version. You just cant do an in-place upgrade to the [&]

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Its finally ready! For the last two years, Ive been working on-and-off on a new community resource. It was postponed during 2015 while I mentored 50+ people, but this year Ive had a bunch of time to work on it. I present to the community a comprehensive library of all wait types and latch classes that [&]

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Yesterday in class we had a discussion around the conceptual problem of reconciling the fact that SQL Server does set-based operations, but that it does them in query plans that pass single rows around between operators. In other words, it uses iterative processing to implement set-based operators. The crux of the discussion is: if SQL [&]

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A question came up in class today about easily seeing the degree of parallelism for parallel query plans, so Ive updated my waiting tasks script to pull in the dop field from sys.dm_exec_query_memory_grants. Here it is for your use. Enjoy! (Note that ‘text’ on one line does not have delimiters because that messes up the code formatting plugin):

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Over the weekend there was a discussion on the MVP distribution list about the sys.dm_tran_database_transactions DMV and how one cannot use it to accurately determine how much log an operation has generated because it doesnt provide a roll-up of the sub-transaction metrics to the outer transaction. This makes the output somewhat non-intuitive. The discussion prompted me to [&]

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Through May and June, were offering a complete single-instance health-check for a flat fee of US$2,500&  One of the most popular services we provide to new clients is a SQL Server Health Check, whether the new client is a Fortune-25 company or a small company with only a handful of employees. Theres a lot of [&]

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Glenn’s new course is called SQL Server: Scaling SQL Server 2012 and 2014: Part 2 and is just under 3 hours long. It covers a plethora of configuration and hardware issues that can prevent a workload from scaling, plus methods for scaling up and out and new features in 2014 that can help. Part 1 of the course (here) [&]

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Erin’s new course is called SQL Server: Understanding and Using DBCC Commands and is just over 2.25 hours long. It covers all the documented DBCC commands and a few of the undocumented ones, plus Erin goes into details about how to use DMVs, when available, to provide more detailed information. The modules are: Introduction Basic Commands Informational Commands [&]

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No, this isnt an April fools joke. Microsoft announced today at the Build conference that theyve made SQL Server 2014 (and 2016 when it ships) Developer Edition completely free to download for anyone whos a member of the free Visual Studio Dev Essentials community. The idea is to make it easier for developers to work [&]

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My first post of the year is about our first Pluralsight course of the year! Jonathans new course is called SQL Server: Building Simple Asynchronous Applications and is just over 1.5 hours long. Its the first in a series of courses that Jonathans doing this year about using Service Broker, based on the extensive work hes done with some [&]

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The last post of the year! It’s been a really excellent year all round and time for my traditional post counting down some of the numbers that have been my life this year. 109318: the number of miles I flew on United 33313: my current tweet total (up 1345 from 2014) 12941: the number of subscribers [&]

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Back in 2009 I started posting a summary at the end of the year of what I read during the year (see my posts from 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014) and people have been enjoying it, so here I present the 2015 end-of-year post. I set a moderate goal of 50 books this year and I managed [&]

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Through popular demand (our IEPTO2 class in Ireland in October 2015 sold out with 40 students!) we’ve managed to juggle a bit more of our schedule around and found space to fit in another European class in 2016, and it’s open for registration! Kimberly and I will be teaching our signature IEPTO-1 (formerly IE1) Immersion Event on Performance Tuning [&]

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As we all wind down for the 2015 holiday season, we want to give the SQL Server community a holiday gift to say ‘thank you’ for all your support during 2014, and what better gift than more free content?! As many of you know, I publish a bi-weekly newsletter to more than 13,000 subscribers that [&]

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Im running this survey to help the SQL Server team at Microsoft, who would like to get a broad view of current tempdb configurations. Ill editorialize the results as well in a week or two. Feel free to run the code below any way you want, and also add a single preceding column to the result [&]

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An interesting corruption problem cropped up on the MCM distribution list yesterday and after I figured it out, I thought it would make a good blog post in case anyone hits a similar problem. In a nutshell, the problem was corruption such that a simple SELECT * query failed, but a SELECT * query with [&]

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After the success of our brand-new class on Practical Data Science this week, weve decided to expand it to five days and bring it back to Chicago again next year. The course is our Immersion Event on Practical Data Science using Azure Machine Learning, SQL Data Mining, and R, presented by our great friend Rafal Lukawiecki. [&]

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By the end of December, we at SQLskills will have remotely presented to 87 user groups and PASS virtual chapters around the world in 2015! Wed love to present remotely for your user group in 2016, anywhere in the world. It’s not feasible for us to travel to user groups or SQL Saturdays unless we’re already in [&]

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