Archive for the ‘SQL Server’ Category

YAY! Somebody likes me…

I just got the email today; Red Gate friended me.  Or, rather, I am now a Friend of Red Gate.  What does this mean?  I try to think of it kind of like a NASCAR patch; I now have a perpetual sponsor for all of my various presentations in the SQL community.   I don’t [...]

October 14, 2009   Posted in: SQL Server  One Comment

Building ranges using numbers

A while back, I posted a solution to a problem I was facing where I needed to generate a table of ranges.  While I haven’t experienced any sort of issues with the solution, a couple of things have recently occurred which has caused me to go back and take a look at the problem, and [...]

September 27, 2009   Posted in: SQL, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication  No Comments

FizzBuzz

Stumbled across Mike Hillwig’s post in response to a question posed by Brent Ozar.  Depending on how literally you want to use the word “print” (do you mean the actual command, or do you just want output?), I think I have a slightly more elegant solution than what Mike proposed.
SELECT CASE WHEN n%3=0 AND n%5=0 [...]

September 27, 2009   Posted in: SQL, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication  No Comments

Coming to PASS Summit 2009: Twitter BINGO!

So, last year at PASS Summit, I had my first real experience with a heavily-twittered event.  What was interesting was that I met a lot of people in real-life that I had just recently begun following on Twitter; I had made the comment (in passing) to someone that we should have had BINGO cards [...]

September 25, 2009   Posted in: Conferences, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, The Social Web  23 Comments

Another tale of the unwilling DBA – tempdb and the LUN

As many of you know, I’m a database DEVELOPER; I’ve been a DBA in the past, but my real specialty lies in getting different database platforms to exchange information with SQL Server.  I haven’t done a lot of hands-on administration (backups, maintenance plans, etc) in a while, but that’s changed recently.  Our primary production DBA [...]

September 11, 2009   Posted in: SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication  No Comments

Wrapup: Columbus, GA SQL Server User Group, August 25, 2009

Tuesday, I drove to Columbus,GA to speak at the Columbus GA SQL Server User Group; I had first met Ken Simmons at the Birmingham SQL Saturday, and had promised him that I would drive down there to present.  Ken’s done a great job of organizing a PASS chapter in a small-town setting; Columbus doesn’t have [...]

August 29, 2009   Posted in: Conferences, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, User Groups  No Comments

Columbus, GA SQL Server Users Group – August 25th

Just confirmed today with Ken Simmons that I’ll be presenting at the Columbus GA SQL Server Users Group on August 25th at 6 pm at the Columbus Public library; if you’re in mid-west Georgia (and a data geek), come join us, and stop by and say “hi!”
I’ll be re-hashing a talk I gave at [...]

August 2, 2009   Posted in: SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, User Groups  No Comments

Fun with NEWSEQUENTIALID()

We’re thinking about converting the constrain on an existing column in a table with billions of rows of data.  The column is a uniqueidentifier serving as a nonclustered primary key; we’re planning on replacing the NEWID() constraint to a NEWSEQUENTIALID().  What is challenging me is my concern over primary key collisions; will the new default [...]

July 31, 2009   Posted in: SQL, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication  One Comment

Partitioning computed columns

For a project at work, I’ve been asked to help optimize our ETL process.  Part of that involves taking an existing table, and partitioning it along two existing columns.  Since the partitioning process only supports partitioning on one column, the obvious choice is to use a computed column.  I ran into some issues along the [...]

July 22, 2009   Posted in: SQL, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication  No Comments

Quick Tip: TempDB on a multi-core SQL Server box

Just learned this today from one of the Microsoft support reps reviewing our SQL Server 2008 box for performance optimizations: if you are running SQL Server on a multi-core box, you should set up tempdb to have as many data files as there are physical CPU’s (up to a reasonable limit).  These files should also [...]

July 9, 2009   Posted in: SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication  One Comment