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 […]

Shifts Suggest Traditional Admin Roles Changing Dramatically A really big change is hitting the Microsoft system admin space in a recent departure from the teams. (Read more about it here – the departure of Wally Mead). The reason this is so critical and interesting involves a few things that seem to me to be coming together. First, the change to […]

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 […]

Dilip has used both Test Driven Development and Design First Development at his organization. They find the Design First method to be more effective. Dilip Writes: We have tried both the approaches and feel that the traditional approach of preparing a thorough architectural design first and then preparing testing environment is really helpful. This is due to following reasons: A […]

Is SQL Server Consolidation Old-School Now? I’ve been having a bit of a debate on this very topic – where a major goal used to be trying to consolidate down your servers and try to optimize your configurations, now it’s quickly becoming the opposite. It’s a much more complicated question now when it comes to consolidation, optimization, availability and so-on. […]

Choose Your Weapons Carefully… Probably one of the most-asked questions when talking with people facing down the SQL Server beast is "where do I start…" followed by "how do I know what pieces to pay attention to?" I typically end up talking with the person about what they like doing with information and systems – do they prefer creating new […]

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a technique used for software design where development begins with testing and the design of the code emerges. First a developer defines a method necessary to solve a business problem. Then a unit test is created to test a method implementation. Finally, a method is created in a class until the test passes. The application […]

Tony has been working with computers long enough to remember when we had to reservice time to compile code. Becuase computer access was extremely limited they used Peer Review to try and resolve bugs and optimize code before accessing the computer. It turns out the process is very similar to pair programming today. Tony Writes: “Nearly 50 years ago when […]