Moving A Database to New Storage With No Downtime

It’s once again the second Tuesday of the month, meaning it’s T-SQL Tuesday! This month’s topic comes to us from Jen McCown (blog | @JenniferMcCown). Jen is asking us to share our knowledge about filegroups, and it just so happens that I have a story about migrating to new storage that involved a large number [...]

Bigger Databases Aren't Always Better

I’m fortunate to be able to work with some rather large SQL Server instances on a daily basis, including databases over 25TB in size. Due to their bulk, “VLDBs” (Very Large Databases) present some challenges for DBAs: following best practices for small transactional systems might not be feasible on a VLDB. Regular maintenance processes such [...]

Does Restoring A Database Modify the Boot Page?

At work, a key function of my team is importing new systems into our data warehouse, most of which come from vendors. To do this we utilize many different methods depending on the capabilities of the source system and desired timeliness of the data. ETL through SSIS, snapshot replication, and transactional replication are among the [...]

Red Gate SQL in the City: Chicago

Back at the first Chicago Free-Con event in 2011, Brent Ozar was talking about how wonderful the SQL Saturday movement is and prophesized that in the near future we’ll be seeing similar free training events put on by individual vendors instead of community volunteers. Eighteen months later I found myself at Red Gate’s SQL in [...]

T-SQL Tuesday #35: A Horror Story

This year, time seems to be flying by faster than ever. It’s October already, and we’re up to our 35th installment of T-SQL Tuesday. This time we’re hosted by Nick Haslam (blog | @nhaslam). Nick’s asking “what is your most horrifying discovery from your work with SQL Server?”

The story that scares me the most is [...]