TypeScript…Will it Catch On? TypeScript is a language sponsored by Microsoft making it easier to write JavaScript code while using more structured language constructs. Some of the features it supports are: Type annotations and compile-time type checking Classes Interfaces Modules Abbreviated "arrow" syntax for anonymous functions You can write native JavaScript that emulates some of these concepts; but not in […]

Continuous Integration and Other Tips I keep talking about continuous integration because I have come to rely on the feedback it provides. As you commit changes to your version control, the continuous integration engine gets a fresh copy of the code, builds the code, and runs tests against the compiled results providing the team with a quick picture of the […]

Managing Database Files for Direct Attached Storage When managing your database files in a direct attached storage situation where the host Operating System manages the disk controller, your options are often quite restricted, and probably have a greater impact that other solutions such as a SAN or a Cloud database server. Direct attached storage can be internal or external disks […]

Disk Organization on a SAN Today I wanted to talk about deploying your databases on a SAN. The SAN brings a different set of opportunities often outside the control of the DBA. In a perfect world we try to break up disk contention between competing disk resources. For this reason you would attempt to separate on different physical disks, tempDB, […]

Disk Organization Can Significantly Impact Database Performance There are a lot of techniques for organizing your database files that impact the performance of your database. For some databases, there is no measurable gain; for others, your implementation can determine if the database will perform at all. At issue are keeping statistics up to date, reducing the amount of data fragmentation, […]

One Size Fits All…Not As a result of the different views on database shrinking are expressed it becomes clear that there is no single technique that fits all cases. For example, yesterday I proposed that disk space is cheap, and that disk space acquired by re-indexing, etc. would most likely be needed in the near future, and that nothing is […]

Database Shrinking Ok, talking about shrinking databases is like trolling for comments. And they came today. I’m going to post them here though, because they pretty well demonstrate why it is not really a useful practice to shrink databases. In fact, that was the reason I hadn’t done it on a production system for over a decade. Here are some […]

What to Do with Data Captured from Monitoring A while back I talked about monitoring you should perform on your systems. It doesn’t matter if those systems are database servers, middleware, or something different entirely. The point is that you need to monitor those servers so that you know what typical operation parameters are. With that baseline, when performance degrades, […]

Shrinking Database Files I hate shrinking database files. I hadn’t shrunk files in years for all the good reasons you can read about with a simple google search. Recently, I had the opportunity to do some shrinking. I had a database that contained multiple file groups for performance and backup reasons. The database is nearly ½ terabyte. All of the […]

Deadlock Victim SQL Server used to return error messages to queries saying your processed had been canceled because you query was elected as the Deadlock Victim for a blocking query. This event was due to the fact that your process held a lock on an object necessary for another query to complete. That other query held a lock on an […]