By now you have probably seen the news about a major flaw in the design of CPUs from all major vendors (Intel, AMD, and ARM) resulting in a series of vulnerabilities in operating systems and… Secure or fast? Secure, obviously …
In November 2017, during the PASS Summit keynote, Microsoft’s Bob Ward (Principal Architect) demonstrated a “diskless database” running on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) hardware. The storage layer is known as “persistent memory”. At the end of… No moving parts, the story of persistent memory
For the last five months or so, I have been helping some really smart people put words on paper, both the physical and electronic kind, which is hopefully going to culminate in an actual technical… SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out
[2018-07-03 edit: The original name of this feature was XE Profiler, but it was changed to XEvent Profiler in SSMS 17.4.] I have a favourite new feature of SQL Server Management Studio 17 (SSMS), and… Gimmicks that work: XEvent Profiler in SQL Server Management Studio
Joe Obbish wrote an epic post a few weeks ago about loading a trillion rows into a non-partitioned table in SQL Server, using a clustered columnstore index to maximise the compression. (Short version: it’s very… A trillion and one
Last week, I posted this statement on Twitter, along with a screen capture of the official Microsoft documentation: Reminder: Max Server Memory is *not* just for the buffer pool. The RAM limit Standard Edition can… What you need to know about memory limits on SQL Server
Last week we looked at ACID compliance. This week we dive a little deeper into the Isolation portion, and what it all means. Isolation levels work to manage how my transactions may be isolated from… Locks, Blocks, and Isolation Levels
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL use transactions to allow concurrent users to select, insert, update, and delete data without affecting everyone else. An RDBMS is considered ACID-compliant… Acids and Databases: A look at ACID and transactions
We can easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on core licences for SQL Server, and then we go and install the product on an operating system with the default Balanced Power Plan, which is,… Balanced Power Saving T-SQL script
Last week I demonstrated at least 30% performance improvement by switching to memory optimised table-valued parameters on SQL Server 2016. This week I will demonstrate the same test using Azure SQL Database, on the Premium… Look, Ma, No Surprises
Last week, I mentioned a feature in SQL Server, and now in Azure SQL Database, called Memory-Optimized Table-Valued Parameters, which makes use of In-Memory OLTP structures to work around a dependency on tempdb, and thereby… How to make your T-SQL thirty percent faster
November brings me back to my regular weekly posting schedule. I attended PASS Summit 2016 last week, and saw a lot of great sessions. Aside from the new stuff, what I also noticed is how… Memory-Optimized Table-Valued Parameters
Let’s talk briefly about resource limits with Azure SQL Database. Because we have to share resources with other users, and because Microsoft doesn’t want us affecting others dramatically, they have implemented some limits. If for… Azure SQL Database Limits
On Saturday 9 April 2016, four days from today, I will be speaking at the first ever SQLSaturday in the province of Alberta. Edmonton is the provincial capital, so it makes sense to have it… Speaking at SQLSaturday 507 this weekend in Edmonton
This post has nothing to do with SQL Server, but if you like performance tuning, stick around. I learn technology by using it, pushing it to its limits, finding out how it breaks. I jokingly… Lazy Loading and Tries