FatherJack

From nowhere to somewhere in no time at all.

fatherjack — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:00:00 GMT

I am pleased to introduce another guest post from my wife, Annette (@mrs_fatherjack) (this also partially explains the cat picture). 2 years ago I'd never heard of SQL Bits, I wasn't into 'the community' in any way and just plodded along doing what I did, probably not very well. I was employed as a SQL Developer but in reality for the past few years my role had been primarily management with very little development. I went to SQL Bits 6 (London) with my husband, Jonathan (@Fatherjack), not really...(read more)

Indexing - take the hint and leave it to the experts

fatherjack — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The most common T-SQL command in use has to be the SELECT statement, it is the bedrock of any SQL Professional's day. Sometimes it's used to snatch some data from a table or two while some quick investigation is done, other times it is at the heart of a stored procedure or view that will inform business decisions for coming months or even years. The latter purpose means you should spend some time making sure it is as efficient as possible. Not endless hours to save a millisecond or two (I mentioned...(read more)

New Year resolution: A better diet and some home cooking

fatherjack — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Many people reflect on their diet at this time of year and decide to make changes and I would suggest that all DBAs should do the same. This is not because I think any DBA is over-weight (although I'd like to be a bit lighter than I am) but because they should be considering what their SQL Servers are having to consume and how that is affecting their health and performance. Just like a human that eats too many take-away burgers a server that is working with poor TSQL will become slow to respond...(read more)

How many indexes is the right amount?

fatherjack — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:00:00 GMT

I would be deafened by the chorus of DBA's shouting "It depends" at me after a question like that in person, I somehow feel safer from the far side of Live Writer. I have recently been looking at the number of indexes in one of my databases and have found a curiously high number of indexes in comparison to the number of columns. Right, all the code now and some discussion underneath itUSE [AdventureWorks]GO/*To locate tables that may be over populated with indexes and list them in order of concern.Jonathan...(read more)

TSQL development

fatherjack — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:00:00 GMT

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Word* Microsoft Office Word is useful. There, I have confessed it, it's useful to me while I am working with TSQL. It's possibly only the search and replace function that I like but it's wrapped in Word so I have to take it like that. I use it a lot to help me capture the results of a stored procedure. Let's say we want to review what processes are connected to our server so we execute the stored procedure sp_who. This is useful but maybe we...(read more)

Time to Check Your Servers

fatherjack — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 08:20:00 GMT

Do you know how to find the time that your SQL Server started? Since SQL Server 2008 you can use: SELECT sqlserver_start_timeFROM sys.dm_os_sys_info On one of my servers this gives me: This is great, and can be used in lots of ways. I happened across the [sys].[dm_exec_requests]view the other day and out of curiosity ran the query SELECT MIN(start_time) AS [start time]FROM [sys].[dm_exec_requests] AS der And I was surprised to see the result as: Almost exactly an hour different....(read more)

How to stop Office 2010 changing " and ' to smart quotes

fatherjack — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:00:00 GMT

I have recently upgraded to Office 2010 at work and there are a few things that are a real problem for me. As a T-SQL developer and SQL Server DBA I copy and paste code to and from various applications and if Word gets involved it can has disastrous consequences. There is an option that appears to be defaulted to "on" that changes a straight quote to what Word describes as a smart quote - see the image below. Note - the single quote suffers from the same effect. Now, getting to the point that...(read more)

Bringing Alerts and Operators together with Notifications

fatherjack — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:00:00 GMT

I have covered SQL Server Alerts (Alerts are good, arent they?) on this blog before and I more recently did a post regarding Notifications (Are your Jobs talking to you) and how they should be configured. Now we need to check that these things are linked up so that when an Alert condition is met that you get the appropriate Notifications sent to Operators. Straight into the code we need and then a review of what it does ... DECLARE @ChosenOperator SYSNAME DECLARE @FailSafeOp TABLE ...(read more)

What job is most similar to being a DBA?

fatherjack — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 02:00:00 GMT

As long as I have worked with computers, and that's a length of time that may be easier on the eye when converted to dog-years, computers have been compared with cars. I guess the car was the most complicated thing in our lives until the PC arrived. We had plenty of time to get used to the car and how it worked, or not, and how it gradually became more complex. We can compare backups to spare tyres, CPU cores to pistons ("the more you blow, the faster you go"), and so on. I am not aware...(read more)

Jobs - are your SQL Agent jobs talking to you enough?

fatherjack — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:00:00 GMT

Most DBAs will have at least a couple of servers that have SQL Agent jobs that are scheduled to do various things on a regular basis. There is a whole host of supporting configuration settings for these jobs but some of the most important are notifications. Notification settings are there to keep you up to date on how your job executions went. You have options on types of notification - email, pager, net send, or an entry in the SQL Server Event Log and you get options on when each of these channels...(read more)

62 miles up

fatherjack — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:10:00 GMT

RedGate are known for being a software company with a big personality and having a huge presence in the SQL Community. They run the annual Exceptional DBA competition, having held a party at the PASS summit last night to celebrate this years winner - Jeff Moden. They have also got a great attitude towards their staff as demonstrated on their website. Today, just after the PASS Summit keynote speech they made an announcement that is literally going to give one lucky winner the ride of their life....(read more)

SQL Relay - G is for GO

fatherjack — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:00:00 GMT

At the SQL Relay event last week all the UK user group leaders did a combined session - The A to Z of SQL - where we all took two letters of the alphabet and gave a 2 minute (it was strictly timed) talk on something SQL related beginning with those letters. It was quite a riot working through 26 different talks in an hour with 25 speaker handovers and the associated switches between SSMS and the slide deck. As a speaker I thoroughly enjoyed it and i hoe we informed as much as we entertained the...(read more)

SQL Bits 9 and SQL Relay 2011

fatherjack — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:00:00 GMT

A very quick post to say how proud and happy it made me to be involved with these two events. I was a helper and speaker at SQL Bits and, as I am a user group leader, one of the organisers of the SQL Relay event. My code samples and test data for the SQL Bits session are now available, I'll post the SQL Relay G - Go code in a day or two...(read more)

PASS UK Regional Mentor

fatherjack — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:32:00 GMT

I have just had an email from Mark Ginnebaugh welcoming me to the role of PASS UK Regional Mentor. This was a role previously carried out by Simon Sabin but he has recently stepped down due to other pressures on his time so Chris Testa O'Neill and I have been appointed. There are 16 user groups in the UK currently and they are all taking part in SQL Relay on 3rd to 6th Oct. If you can get to any of the meetings then please come along and help boost the SQL Community in your area. I'm looking forward...(read more)

SQL Relay - Building the Community

fatherjack — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 02:00:00 GMT

Currently there are 16 user groups in the UK connected with SQL Server, they cover a lot of the UK spanning from Exeter (The one that I run) to Edinburgh and from Cardiff to Maidstone. We all run regular meetings that are free to attend and have speakers from all over the UK giving training, advice and introductions to all parts of SQL Server. We encourage local members to start speaking and sharing their tips and tricks. If you don't already attend a local user group meeting then I would urge you...(read more)