I’m kinda weird. I get excited when I’m troubleshooting a SQL Server problem, and I keep hitting walls. I’ll give you an example. A client came to me because they were struggling with sporadic performance problems in Azure SQL DB, and nothing seemed to make sense: sp_BlitzFirst @SinceStartup = 1 showed very clearly that their top wait, by a long shot, was blocking. Hundreds of hours of it in a week. sp_BlitzIndex showed the “Aggressive Indexes” warning on a single table, but… only tens of minutes of locking, nowhere near the level the database was seeing overall. sp_BlitzCache @SortOrder = ‘d ..read more

I recently went to Shanghai & Hong Kong, and stopped to take your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while sitting next to the Hong Kong harbor. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:18 Jason G – RN & Accidental DBA: Would you elaborate on DB Owner implications? sp_Blitz help recommends using the SA account, but the articles referenced by Andreas Wolter advocate for using low privileged accounts which are DB specific. Which would you recommend and why? 02:44 MyTeaGotCold: Can you name any good relational databases that aren’t built around SQL? It’s strange that a system ..read more

As a consultant, I sometimes see SQL Servers with high CPU core counts relative to their workload. For example, the situation that inspired this post was seeing half a dozen SQL Servers with ~50 cores each, hundreds of cores total – yet they consistently had just 1-5% CPU usage. Here’s what I said to management: Right now, you’re running SQL Server on 280 cores. SQL Server Enterprise Edition licensing is about $7,000 per core, so you’ve installed $1,960,000 worth of licensing. If an employee or former employee goes to the BSA and reports you, they may get a pretty sizable cash reward. I’m not ..read more

So you’ve got an iPhone or iPad or Vision Pro, and you bought one of my training classes or the Fundamentals or Mastering passes, and you wanna watch the classes while you’re offline. Perhaps you wanna learn on the train ride in to work, or perhaps on the weekends, you like to completely disconnect from the world and retreat into a bunker lined with a Faraday cage. I won’t judge. Go into the app store and get the Teachable online courses app: Log in, and you’ll see your list of courses: Click on a course, click on a lesson, and at the top right of each lesson, there’s a download button: Cli ..read more

A few career and security questions found their way into the queue at https://pollgab.com/room/brento for this episode: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:10 Ethan: What percent of your constant care shops require encryption to connect with SQL server? What are your thoughts on mandatory encryption? 03:24 Miles: Hi Brent, an app that spawns multiple spid’s,multiple txns.While troubleshooting BLOCKING,initially thought to trace one spid and all sql stmts for that spid.But it turned out, multiple spids r getting involved? how to troubleshoot issues when multiple spids & db’s are involv ..read more

You’ve been reading my site for a while, watching videos, keeping up with the best SQL Server techniques. However, you’ve got a lot of other folks on your team who don’t have as much free time as you, or they’re just getting started on their SQL Server performance tuning journey. Forward this post to them, because they need to know about Fundamentals Week, May 6-10. Hey you! You love live classes. You’ve tried watching recordings or stepping through demos yourself, but…you just can’t block out the time, and you can’t stay motivated while you’re watching a recording. You like the fast-paced ene ..read more

Sometimes y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento that require extended answers. Today, I’m hitting just 3 questions: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:44 MyTeaGotCold: If storage is no issue, do I need to worry about the size of Query Store? It’s going to hit 10% of the size of my largest database. I have no interest in changing QUERY_CAPTURE_MODE away from ALL or my retention period. 04:12 DB-Ay?: For a high activity table, is it worth updating stats at a higher percentage just for auto-update to resample at a lower rate within an hour? I’m not able to persist the valu ..read more

Is your company hiring for a database position as of April 2024? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s set up some rapid networking here. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job title, and either a link to the full job description, or the text of it. It doesn’t have to be a SQL Server DBA job, but it does have to be related to databases. (We get a pretty broad readership here – it can be any database.) An email address to send resumes, or a link to the application process – if I were you, I’d put an email address ..read more

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