Data and Information Management, Big Data, Data Science

SQL Server Drill Down

Three Key Steps to Benchmark a Proposed Architecture When you decide to undertake your own benchmarking project, it's a strongly recommended best practice to write up a benchmarking plan. A benchmark must produce results that are both reliable and repeatable so that we can foster conclusions that are predictable and actionable. Keeping the "reliable and repeatable" mantra in mind necessitates a few extra steps.
DBTA E-Edition - May 2013 Issue

Running Your Own TPC Benchmarks The best database benchmarks are those that accurately and reliably reflect the applications and configuration of your own database infrastructure. On the other hand, the amount of work that goes into extracting your own transactional workload can be immense. An easier route is to learn and run your own TPC benchmarks, use one of the free tools to run the benchmark, and then extrapolate the TPC test results for your environments. In light of the past several articles in this column about the TPC benchmarks, you're probably wondering how you can do your own TPC benchmark test. First, is this caveat: A "true" TPC benchmark must go through a rigorous and expensive auditing process. So when I say "run your own TPC benchmark," what I really mean is running a "TPC-like" benchmark which contains all of the activities of a regular TPC benchmark, but without the auditing.
DBTA E-Edition - April 2013 Issue

Cheaters Never Win, Even in TPC Benchmarks Two columns ago, I described how the TPC benchmarks are useful for getting a general idea of the performance characteristics of your preferred database vendor and hardware platform. And in last month's column, I described how the published TPC benchmarks can even help with pricing, especially when you don't have your own quantity discounts in place.
DBTA E-Edition - March 2013 Issue

Use TPC Database Benchmarks to Save Money Today, I would like to give you a primer on how to read the benchmark reports that are published by the major database and hardware vendors. You never know when a vendor will publish a new benchmark. There's no set schedule for them to publish their test findings. Of course, you can always look for new advertisements from many of the vendors. But that's very imprecise.
DBTA E-Edition - February 2013 Issue

Introduction to TPC Database Benchmarks Let's talk about database application benchmarking. This is a skill set which, in my opinion, is one of the major differentiators between a journeyman-level DBA and a true master of the trade. In this article, I'll be giving you a brief introduction to TPC benchmarks and, in future articles, I'll be telling you how to extract specific tidbits of very valuable information from the published benchmark results. But let's get started with an overview.
DBTA E-Edition - January 2013 Issue

Welcome to the Weird, Wild World of Licensing Not long in the past, SQL Server licensing was an easy and straightforward process. You used to take one of a few paths to get your SQL Server licenses. The first and easiest path was to buy your SQL Server license with your hardware. Want to buy a HP Proliant DL380 for a SQL Server application? Why not get your SQL Server Enterprise Edition license with it at the same time? Just pay the hardware vendor for the whole stack, from the bare metal all the way through to the Microsoft OS and SQL Server.
DBTA E-Edition - December 2012 Issue

Virtualization Conquers the Database I was privileged to deliver a session entitled Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World at the PASS Summit 2012, the largest annual conference for Microsoft SQL Server. It was a packed house, literally at standing-room-only capacity. I delivered the session with my friend David Klee and we were swarmed by attendees after the session wrapped up. With almost 600 people in the room, we conducted one of those informal polls that speakers like to do along the lines of "Raise your hands if …" and the informal findings were very telling. Probably around 90% of the attendees used VMware and SQL Server in some capacity and at least 60% used it in production environments. Another important fact was that only 10% of the attendees were actually able to get information on the performance of the actual VMs themselves. Most had to get all of their information and support from the VM / System administration staff.
DBTA E-Edition - November 2012 Issue

What to Expect at the PASS 2012 Community Summit Fall is my favorite time of the year for a lot of reasons. I love the cooling temperatures and the falling leaves. I enjoy the fall sports and school activities of my kids. And, perhaps best of all, I get to enjoy the yearly high-point for SQL Server professionals, the annual Community Summit put on by the Professional Association for SQL Server (www.sqlpass.org).For a technologist, the reasons to attend the annual conference of your profession should be self-evident. At the PASS 2012 Summit, there are nearly 200 technical sessions from beginner to advanced level over the duration of the week of November 5.
DBTA E-Edition - October 2012 Issue

What is AlwaysOn? SQL Server 2012 introduces a lot of new features which, like the columnstore indexes I discussed last month, are inspiring a lot of excitement in the user community. However, there's been a bit of confusion around the set of features commonly known as AlwaysOn.
DBTA E-Edition - September 2012 Issue

New In SQL Server 2012: Columnstore Indexes SQL Server 2012 includes a lot of new and exciting features. One feature that has caught the imagination of many in the user community is the high-performance feature called Columnstore Indexes. (Incidentally, it was also known as Apollo during its beta cycles). Columnstore indexes, as their name implies, store indexed (and always compressed) data contiguously in columns, rather than in standard format where the data is stored contiguously on 8Kb data pages according to the rows in which the data resides. Because of their structures, columnstore indexes speed up read-heavy operations like data warehouse queries from factors of 10x to 100x.
DBTA E-Edition - August 2012 Issue

Why Database Administrators Should Consider Windows Server Core After chatting with my friend and fellow Microsoft MVP Allen White about Windows Server Core on a recent SQLCruise.com excursion, I realized that this is a technology I should be evangelizing more. I hope you've heard about Windows Server Core and are considering using it for your SQL Server, and, indeed, any relational database platform you're currently running on Windows Server. Why?
DBTA E-Edition - July 2012 Issue

Getting Up-To-Speed on SQL Server 2012 By now, you've heard that Microsoft has publicly released SQL Server 2012. I have to be honest in telling you that it came sooner than I expected, despite my many inside connections at Microsoft. I was fully expecting the RTM to occur a bit before summer, just in time for a spectacular launch at Microsoft TechEd.
DBTA E-Edition - June 2012 Issue

Practitioner-Level Blogs for the SQL Server Professional Last month, I told you about my favorite master-level blogs for the SQL Server professional. This month, I'm reviewing my favorite blogs for working SQL Server professionals who seriously want to grow their skills. What's the difference between a master-level blog and a practitioner-level blog, you ask?
DBTA E-Edition - April 2012 Issue

Master-Level Blogs for the SQL Server Professional Recently, I was speaking at a SQL Saturday event (www.sqlsaturday.com), when I encountered a question that I've been getting more and more often. It went something like this: "I know that I can look up a lot of SQL Server blogs thru the various aggregators, such as SQLBlog.com, SQLServerPedia.com, SQLServerCentral.com, and SQLMag.com, but what are the very best high-end blogs that you read?" Since this is an evergreen question, I figured I'd provide a more permanent answer and anchor it here at DBTA.com and on my own blog.
DBTA E-Edition - March 2012 Issue

2011 in Review: NoSQL Sturm und Drang, While Relational DBs Hibernate Looking back on 2011, I'm struck by two larger trends in the overall database marketplace. First, most energy and excitement (but not much forward motion) seems to be coming from the NoSQL space. And second, the major relational database platforms are generating what little energy they can outside of their core RDBMS technologies. If you kept up on one or more of the better general IT-industry news sources, you probably saw dozens of stories about various NoSQL vendors, spin-offs, and technologies in a single month, compared with perhaps one or two stories in the same period of time covering a traditional RDBMS platform such as Oracle, Microsoft's SQL Server, or MySQL.
DBTA E-Edition - February 2012 Issue

Beyond 2012: The Future of Data Management Careers Let's tie together the last several columns on "2012 Might Really be The End of the World." In this series, I discussed several megatrends in the general IT industry that will have a tremendous impact on the database administration (DBA) profession. The megatrends include both software-related (virtualization and cheap cloud database services) and hardware-related (SSDs and massively multi-core CPUs). These technologies have the potential to obviate many of the core competencies of the DBA, with the first two eliminating or lessening the need for server and hardware configuration and provisioning, and the last two diminishing the need for IO tuning and query tuning, respectively. But those are trends that will take years to reach fruition. What about the near future?
DBTA E-Edition - January 2012 Issue

Megatrend: Virtualization Three columns ago, I started a series of articles pointing out that tough times are a-comin' for the DBA profession due to major disruptive changes in the wider IT world (see "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It"). In previous columns, I have told you about how our lives will change due to major technological changes caused by things such as Solid State Disks (SSD) and massively multicore CPUs.
DBTA E-Edition - December 2011 Issue

Database - Abstracted I started a column series a couple of months ago about emerging but significantly disruptive technologies, with a post entitled, "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It." I called out four disruptive technologies that will significantly change, if not outright overturn, the day-to-day work of database professionals. Those technologies are virtualization, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSD), and advanced multi-core CPUs.
DBTA E-Edition - October 2011 Issue

CPUs in Flux Two columns ago, I started a series of articles pointing out that tough times might be in the future for the DBA profession because of major disruptive changes happening in the wider IT world (see "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It"). Last issue, I spoke about the Solid State Disk and how it's changing the way we have to deal with and troubleshoot IO performance (see "The Changing State of Hardware" in the August E-Edition of DBTA). This time, I want to talk about computing power and multicore CPUs. Moore's Law famously states that the numbers of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every 18-24 months.
DBTA E-Edition - September 2011 Issue

The Changing State of Hardware In last month's column, "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It," I described a number of major developments in the IT industry that are likely to disrupt the life of database professionals everywhere. I categorize those four disrupters - virtualization, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSD), and advanced multi-core CPUs - into two broad groups. I'm going to continue an analysis of these disruptive technologies in inverse order. Today, let's discuss SSDs.
DBTA E-Edition - August 2011 Issue

2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It Like most people, I chuckled under my breath when doomsayers started publishing books about the apocalypse predicted by their interpretation of the Mayan calendar. In their view, the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 and thus spells doom for us all - despite the fact that the classical Mayan calendar, like ours today, was cyclical. But as I was considering some of the momentous and disruptive changes we're facing lately, it suddenly hit me. The year 2012 might be the year when life as we've known it as IT and data professionals changes, completely and irrevocably
DBTA E-Edition - July 2011 Issue

Fundamental System Troubleshooting Information One of the things I repeatedly encounter when speaking to database professionals working with Microsoft SQL Server is that many of them simply don't know about some of the most elementary and fundamental means of investigating SQL Server performance. For example, I recently created a popular poster for Quest Software that shows all of the most meaningful and useful Windows Performance Monitor (PerfMon) counters. Now friends, PerfMon has been with us since Windows NT Server, and yet, PerfMon counters are a mystery to at least half of the DBAs I meet. Half!
DBTA E-Edition - June 2011 Issue

SQL Server Real-World Trends I have been working with SQL Server for more than 10 years now, and my time with Quest has been spent as a consultant visiting hundreds of customer sites, and discussing their environments and matching products to their issues. This has given me a fairly unique insight into how SQL Server is changing. It has also been intriguing to work closely with colleagues from the Oracle world, and seeing how their opinion of SQL Server has changed. They now take it very seriously, something I like to think I have played a positive part in! The most striking trend I have noticed is the lack of expertise in some environments when using SQL Server. I can confidently say you are extremely unlikely to run an Oracle database without an Oracle DBA. However, in the SQL Server world this practice seems to be commonplace.
DBTA E-Edition - May 2011 Issue

DBAs - Take Control with Resource Governor When I meet SQL Server professionals, I am always interested to find out if they have deployed the latest version of SQL Server into production yet, if they are using Enterprise Edition, and, if so, which new features they are using and why. Nothing beats real world implementation scenarios to help get a better understanding of a feature in SQL Server. The most common Enterprise Edition SQL Server Engine features deployed (and this is not a scientific survey, by any means) appear to be Table Partitioning, Backup Compression (now in Standard Edition) and Resource Governor. The Resource Governor was the feature DBAs working with large-scale SQL Server environments seemed most excited about when SQL 2008 was first announced.
DBTA E-Edition - April 2011 Issue

SQL Server Upgrades and the Importance of Support Microsoft extended support for all editions of SQL Server 7.0 ended on Jan. 11. Considering that this edition was initially replaced 11 years ago by SQL Server 2000 (and there have been three more major releases since), this may not seem to be big news. However, I'm always amazed by the number of DBAs I meet who are still responsible for keeping a few instances of this, or even version 6.5, running in production.
DBTA E-Edition - March 2011 Issue

Run and Hide, the Auditor is Coming! Depending on their industry sectors, many database professionals have to deal with audits at some stage, often removing vital years off their lives and inches off their hairlines! Having worked as a DBA in the financial industry, I've experienced both internal and external auditor visits on multiple occasions. In all cases, we pretty much had to drop all other work to ensure they were provided with the relevant information, or to implement the changes they required so we could provide the information in the future. The auditors' levels of experience and understanding varied wildly. This was not their fault, as they are not paid to be database experts, but it could make them frustrating to work with.
DBTA E-Edition - February 2011 Issue

Denali - It’s the Future In line with recent SQL Server releases, Microsoft on Nov. 9 announced at the PASS Summit that the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of SQL Server 11 - codenamed Denali (after the Alaska mountain also known as Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America) - is available for download and evaluation. This is our first opportunity to look at some of the features that will form the basis for the next major release of SQL Server, expected to be fully available in the second half of 2011.
DBTA E-Edition - January 2011 Issue

SQL in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground SQL Azure is Microsoft's cloud-based relational database service hosted in their data centers, and it's got some DBAs worrying about the future. The more I look at the technology, however, the more I see practical applications for it and the less I think people should be concerned.
DBTA E-Edition - December 2010 Issue

Active in the Community I am attending my first Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit in Seattle this month. A lot of DBAs I meet are very keen to attend these events as the standard of speakers and quality of content is so high. Travel, accommodation and attendance costs are often prohibitive, however, let alone getting the time away from the office. Getting managers' approval to attend and justifying the cost can be difficult, especially for those of us based outside the U.S. PASS also runs a European event in April each year in Germany and, in the U.K., we have the SQL Bits conference. Those who wish to attend can still run into the same objections, however.
DBTA E-Edition - November 2010 Issue

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