If you missed the 24 Hours of PASS Summit 2013 Preview, you missed some excellent sessions. I watched a few, but not all. But now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can go back and catch the ones I missed. You can too. I'd like to call out my session, Be a Successful DBA in the World of Cloud and On-Premises Data. I know that my fellow DBAs and database developers are largely dismissive of Azure. I get it. But I really think you're missing out on this. It's another excellent tool in your toolbox that you need to start taking advantage of. Little things like getting a quick and easy installation of SQL Server 2014 or Windows Server 2012 R2 up and running. Helpful things like the…
I'm trying out a new blog post series, mostly for myself as an exercise. I'm going to pick one speaker each month that I've seen present recently and tell you what I thought of them. Now, don't panic. If you stunk up the place, I won't abuse you... by name. Kidding. This is going to be endlessly positive and supportive. I'll try to find places where you can go to see these speakers in the future, if I can (Lanyrd.com people). If not, maybe they'll notice this post and tell us themselves. For those interested in getting picked, don't bother me. This is arbitrary & random. However, be sure that you have a blog (or equivalent) that I can direct people to or I'll skip over you. If you don't…
Get an invite to a Microsoft meeting? Are they using the new Lync interface? And, you don't have a paid Office365 account do you? So, you click the link, figure it'll open a web browser and off you go, right? Wrong. Instead it opens up a Lync app that you installed with Office, or the one that comes with Windows 8. And then you're stuck. You can't log in if your office doesn't have a Lync server (office?). Thankfully, there's a simple solution. Many thanks to Michael Wood. You just add a string to the end of the URL and you're off to the web app. I couldn't find this anywhere, so I figured I'd share with those who might need the help. Just add '?sl=1' to the end of…
I just did a series of Boogle searches and when that didn't find anything I tried Ging. Neither listed sys.dm_db_wait_stats. Nothing in a search directly against MSDN either. So, let me introduce you to a new DMO, sys.dm_db_wait_stats. It's a dynamic management view since it doesn't require any input. The output is about what you would expect if you thought about it for a second: In short, what we have is the sys.dm_os_wait_stats moved internally into your SQL Database so, even though you cannot get at any of the OS counters from with an a SQL Database normally. In short, thanks Microsoft. Now we can see the wait statistics on our Azure SQL Database in order to better understand where things are problematic. Without documentation I don't know for…
Just a few blog posts that you ought to go and read. First up, Tom LaRock maintains a listing of SQL bloggers split up into various cleverly named groups to show you where to go to get good information. This really is an excellent collection of bloggers. It's the people I go to when I need information. Some of them are better resources than the Books Online when they post something. Personally, I've made the list for the last several years, but Tom has decided that I'm worth of elevation, so I've gone from the Model database to the Master database. Thanks Tom. One blog that's not on Tom's list is Tom's blog. You should be reading that regularly too. And congratulations to Tom again on making MCM. Next, one…
No major updates at the moment. I still haven't played with remoting through PowerShell. I'm just living with it. Had an interesting problem start today. You can swipe from the sides to get different behaviors. Swipe in from the top or bottom and you get menu choices in the app you're in. Swipe in from the right and you get the Charms. Swipe in from the left... well, you're supposed to get the list of recent apps or the ability to set an app in another window or even switch to the previous application, all depending on how you swipe. Except, mine stopped. Hurrah. I did a bunch of poking around to figure out why this happened, hoping I'm not looking at a hardware issue (oh please, not that). When…
Welcome to Day 2 of the PASS Summit! It's been a very exciting event so far. Today I'm presenting two sessions, one on tuning queries by fixing bad parameter sniffing and one on reading execution plans. Please stop by, or watch the one on execution plans on TV as PASS is livestreaming events all day long on SQL TV (which is what I used to call Profiler). The intro video, which can be good or goofy was really good this year. They had people from all over the world talking in their native language, making the point that the PASS organization is a global community. It really is. Doug McDowell is giving us the finance and governance information for the PASS organization. I find this boring and vital at the…
Welcome to the fourth Kilt Day at the SQL PASS Summit. It might be a little silly, but it's fun. It's also Women in Technology day with the WIT Luncheon. Guys are invited. A short word about the bloggers table. Last year we were... a little loud. So this year, we were cautioned... well, more like told to be quiet or they'd take away our toys. I agree with the intent of the message, please keep it down. But the delivery... it hurt PASS at the bloggers table and upset people. As I was reminded last night by a dear, dear friend who I accidently hurt, how you deliver a message is as important as the message you deliver. But, that's OK. Let's learn from our mistakes, grow & move…
I'm working through some code that I haven't touched recently and I'm running it for the first time on a SQL Server 2012 server. The code is a way to load information into the RML utilities and I started hitting errors. First, I hit an error that my server couldn't be connected to, but thanks to Erin Stellato (blog|twitter), I was able to quickly fix that. Then I hit this: Number of processors: 2 Active proc mask: 0x00000003 Architecture: 9 Page size: 4096 Highest node: 0 Package mask: 0x00000001 Processor(s): 0x00000001 Function units: Separated Package mask: 0x00000002 Processor(s): 0x00000002 Function units: Separated Processors: 0x00000003 assigned to Numa node: 0 -Ic:\performancetuning\rml.trc -oc:\bu -SDOJO\RANDORI Using language id (LCID): 1024 [English_United States.1252] for character formatting with NLS: 0x00060101 and Defined: 0x00060101 Attempting to…
If you’re moving to a fully-fledged SQL database as part of Azure you may never even touch SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Instead you may do all the management of your SQL database through the Management Portal. You can actually do everything you need to through this tool. This includes writing and testing T-SQL statements. Believe it or not, it includes execution plans. But, if you’re used to seeing this from a query: Then you may be a little bit surprised at this: Believe it or not, those are identical plans. Yeah, the graphics are different, radically so. But the plans, those are the same. I have a small test database that I have loaded into my local server and onto my Azure SQL Server database. It has identical structures…