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Managing virtual machine drives on ESXi
Recently I migrated my home lab from a SuperMicro SYS-E300-8D to something a little beefier. There were ten virtual machines on the SuperMicro server, nine which were allocated 127 GB of thin-provisioned storage, and one VM with 256 GB of thin-provisioned storage. Thin provisioning — as the name implies — lets the guest operating system
-> Continue reading Managing virtual machine drives on ESXi
I am speaking at the PASS Virtual Summit 2020
After being selected to present my full day pre-conference session at the Summit, I am very pleased to announce that I will also be presenting my Database Administration Through the Ages talk that originated at the Victoria SQL Saturday (which I also presented at the Adelaide user group). Now that PASS has gone virtual with
-> Continue reading I am speaking at the PASS Virtual Summit 2020
These are the extensions I have installed on Azure Data Studio
At last week’s presentation to the Edmonton SQL Server user group, I spoke at length about the many extensions that are available for Azure Data Studio, and was asked by Chris Wood to share all the extensions I use. It’s worth mentioning that for the most part Azure Data Studio extensions are extremely lightweight, both
-> Continue reading These are the extensions I have installed on Azure Data Studio
MAXDOP: not quite what you think
An important change to the MAXDOP documentation was made last week, with a good write up by Pedro Lopes (Twitter), a Program Manager on the SQL Server team at Microsoft. First though, some background on parallelism. How do parallel queries work on SQL Server? SQL Server uses a costing algorithm to decide how “expensive” a
-> Continue reading MAXDOP: not quite what you think
Speaking at the Edmonton PASS user group on 16 July 2020
A short post this week, to let you know that I’ll be presenting a brand new session to the Edmonton PASS user group (EDMPASS) next Thursday. It will be an online session, and you can register at the EDMPASS website here. The topic is SQL Server Management Studio and Azure Data Studio compared, and here
-> Continue reading Speaking at the Edmonton PASS user group on 16 July 2020
Canada Day 2020
It’s Canada Day here, the commemoration of the country’s confederation in 1867. Given events over the last few months such as the worldwide pandemic, followed by a number of politically-motivated movements for change across the United States of America and other countries, it’s a good idea to reflect on what database design might look like
-> Continue reading Canada Day 2020
Unsupported but working versions of SQL Server on Windows Server 2019
One of my hobbies is trying to break technology so that you don’t have to. I don’t consider myself a professional or hobbyist hacker, though if the shoe fits… Last year when Windows Server 2019 was released I wanted to see which versions of SQL Server I could run on it, testing more the unwritten
-> Continue reading Unsupported but working versions of SQL Server on Windows Server 2019
How SQL Server stores data types: UNIQUEIDENTIFIER
This week we’re looking at how the database engine stores GUIDs (globally unique identifiers), specifically known as UNIQUEIDENTIFIER in SQL Server. If you would like to read about storage of other data types, here are the previous posts in the series: Bit columns Dates and times Integers and decimals Money Floating points What is a
-> Continue reading How SQL Server stores data types: UNIQUEIDENTIFIER
How SQL Server stores data types: floating points
In this post we are looking at how SQL Server stores floating point values (FLOAT and REAL). If you’d like to read the previous posts in this series of how SQL Server stores data types, you can do so here: Bit columns Dates and times Integers and decimals Money Floating point values If an integer
-> Continue reading How SQL Server stores data types: floating points
How should I store currency values in SQL Server?
On Twitter, Michael Dyrynda writes: ⚠️ Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever store currency as
-> Continue reading How should I store currency values in SQL Server?