When Things That Are Supposed to Protect You Try to Kill You

This past week I was presented with a very unique issue.  A call came in with a production issue on a tier one application.  Unfortunately it was on a system that utilizes SQL 2000 SP4.  Having a rather small toolset to use for support I had to rely on Perfmon, sysprocesses and the usual old […]

Talent Shift

Today a friend Kevin Edward Kline announced he was joining SQL Sentry.  Last week Kevin announced his intent to leave Quest Software which he has been at for over 10 years.  Being part of the SQL Community for the past 4 years, Kevin has been a staple of Quest.  When I would see a logo […]

IOPS versus Throughput – Measuring Performance of Your Storage

Working on a recent consulting job, I was asked to explain the difference in throughput, which is, measured in MB/s versus IOPS as I had recommended a storage array that would provide many more IOPS and throughput than what is currently in use. For this client I had presented the expected IOPS per type of […]

One week after #sqlsat132

  It has been nearly one week since SQL Saturday 132 in Pensacola Florida.  I was chosen to give my talk on “Know Backups and Know Recovery”.  The session was in the first time slot and when I arrived at the event just before 8:00 AM I had to walk through about 4 inches of […]

Turn on Instant File Initialization for SQL Server Performance – With Video Demo

Without Instant File Initialization turned on, each time a data file on SQL Server 2005 and above is created or has to grow in size, the file or portion of the file added must be zeroed out.  Depending on the size of the file this can be a very time consuming task. By turning on […]