I have been using Chrome as my browsing tool for quite a while now. I almost went back to Internet Explorer when Google decided I didn’t need the up and down arrows at the end of the vertical scroll bar. Nobody needs those because you can scroll using the wheel on the mouse or your arrow keys. At least that […]

Cloud Services in the USA are developing a bad reputation simply because of the intrusion by the US Government into private data assets. As a result some companies are abandoning the US hosting datacenters for locations around the world. The benefits of low cost, stable power and technical expertise are being threatened by the lack of security by an un-repentant […]

Reader Response to Top SQL Server Optimizing Tips Gareth writes: The one thing I would say is disable the Turbo features and configure the BIOS for the High Performance mode. If necessary disable hyperthreading. Regarding section 3 most of this used to be good stuff but in a world of managed hosted machines RAIDed, NAS & SAN storage it’s slightly […]

There is a lot of activity on the question regarding the application of Declarative Referential Integrity, ie. Should you always use it? I was surprised to see some reasonable ideas of how/when you should not use DRI. There were some common points in all of the online comments from our readers. DRI should be the norm, not the exception. DRI […]

A couple days ago I shared some of the results of a conversation I had with a group of DBA regarding what are the things we do that have the most immediate impact improving performance of SQL Server. We talked about optimizing TempDB and defragmenting data internally in SQL Server. A couple of other things that came to the top […]

How important is referential integrity? Don’t act so surprised that I even asked the question. I remember a time when SQL Server didn’t support declarative referential integrity. You had to build your own referential integrity by using triggers. Just a note: you can build referential integrity across databases with triggers. I don’t recommend it because of the overhead; but, it […]

Recently I was talking with a group of DBAs about what we thought were the top tuning techniques for optimizing SQL server performance. If you only had time to do a few things, where would you start? TempDb optimization was the first thing on everybody’s list. SQL Server does a vast amount of work using TempDb simply performing normal queries. […]

Behavioral patterns are increasing in importance for software applications. You see it all the time. You are using a favorite web site for something important to you. Near your desired content in your browseri, or even sometimes in popups, advertisements appear that are amazingly close to your personal interests. We know how some of this happens because our anti-virus software […]

I haven’t been promoting classes for quite a while now. But Kalen has a new one May 2 on SQL Server 2014 you may want to look into. http://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/home.aspx?id=1064 I was simply reading the course description and there are a few things that caught my eye. Licensing is new for the SQL Server tools. This aspect is important for your […]

What is your impression of the re-structuring of rates and services from the big cloud vendors? Sure, they are competing for market share by reducing costs. But, at the same time, they seem to also reducing the performance to match the pricing. In order to maintain the same level of service you may now have to upgrade to a higher […]