Featured Article(s)
How to EASILY Migrate from IIS 6 to IIS 7
There are tons of great new features in IIS7 and the list continues to grow. We identify the top reasons people refuse to upgrade to IIS 7 and show you how a new tool from Microsoft, the Web Deployment Tool, makes the process nearly seamless. It is easier than you think.
Backups Can Sure Eat Up Disk Space…
A key planning point that should be on your checklist is disk space for your backups. If you combine retention of your backups, transaction logs and different scopes of backup (differential, full, etc.), you can quickly chew up a lot of disk space to keep things protected. That’s where Idera’s SQL Safe comes in. You can compress your backups with their new and even more optimized compression algorithms while at the same time optimizing the performance of your backups. It’s a win-win. Get more information here and get your own free trial to test it out on your system.
Data Warehouses and De-Normalization
I’ve had some interesting email and phone conversations about normalization of late. As we have bigger and bigger systems and begin to address the new database extraction requests from our users, it’s becoming clear that de-normalization can be a very strong tool.
I get the sense that things are shifting in terms of the types of design work that are happening. I think there are *so* many new ways information is being processed that it is quickly becoming the case where you’ll want to be able to denormalize data, or at least present a denormalized view of that data, to support reporting and analysis applications. You can help reporting and query performance greatly if done right, but you’ll have to take a step back and consider carefully how your database information is to be used. If you can create better access to information (removing joins, perhaps lowering the number of tables it takes to get a complete record, etc.), you can help your users. Interestingly, you can also give yourself a bit more control over the data and the security you want to have. By building views and other "slices" of information to support applications, you add a new opportunity to define and implement security to protect information.
What have you seen happening in your own applications? Are you denormalizing in support of reporting and analysis of information in your system?
Drop me a note and let me know…
Did You Know?
Did you know you can index views? There are rules of course, but it can be a great help in tuning your queries – build the views you need, then index them so SQL Server can make the most of going after information in the view. Check out "creating indexed views" in books online.
Featured White Paper(s)
The High-Performance DBA
The database administrator’s job continues to grow more challenging as they are called upon to confront new platforms, increa… (read more)
Featured Script
Reduce Transaction log
this routine iteratively will go through and shrink down your transaction log file if there is free space… (read more)