New SelecTViews Show Posted!
SO much great information from the speakers in these shows in the interviews – check it out!
Donald Farmer on the future of BI, SQL Server releases and more. Also, information about NetDBA and your Accidental DBA tip of the day, along with events, tips and tricks.
[Watch the Free Show Here]
Webcast: SQL Server and SharePoint Data Integration
SharePoint’s Data View web part can do much more than just view data. It can serve as a complete front-end to your SQL Server (and other data store) information allowing you to create robust applications without writing code. In this session, you will see just how to create such an application including conditional graphics. You’ll even learn how to pass data from SQL Server into a SharePoint Designer workflow for business process automation.
Presented by: Ricky Spears
> Register Now
> Live date: 10/6/2010 at 12:00 Pacific
Featured White Paper(s)
Why and How You Should Find and Fix Index Fragmentation
In a high-volume database you need frequent critical maintenance. If you skip this important task, index fragmentation may ca… (read more)
Updates – Have You Applied Them?
Recently I was tuning a poor performing stored procedure for a client. There were so many moving parts it was difficult to nail down the causes for poor performance.
This was a highly transactional system with real time reporting off the transactional data. We focused a great deal on concurrency and blocking issues. We found a lot of blocking and performance improved as we fixed each one.
Still, things continued to degrade as the successful sales continued to grow the customer base, and system utilization grew by 10%-20% monthly. Nobody is going to complain about that in this economy…except the existing customers, because their reports went from 3 seconds to 20 seconds to timing out frequently.
We did a lot of tuning in code, system configuration, SAN manipulation, index optimization, etc. But the one thing we did last that really surprised me was apply updates. The system administrator didn’t believe in applying updates. They were still running Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 original release.
Their single most important bread and butter stored procedure suffered from an esoteric bug in SQL Server 2008 that had been fixed over 16 months prior. I found the bug and the temporary fix in Technet and identified it as the cause. I was more surprised to find it had been fixed in SQL 2008 SP1.
So, here is a little war story for you to refer to when your boss says, we don’t need to worry about updates. That’s not to say you should apply every update the minute it is released; but the other extreme is extremely negligent.
I’d really like to hear from you…what are the policies you use for applying updates to your servers? What is the reasoning behind those policies? Share with the group by sending your comments to ben@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben