13 Jul 2010
By Bob Pusateri

T-SQL Tuesday #008: Gettin’ Schooled

SQLServerPedia Syndication, TSQL Tuesday
AIN'T YOU GOT NO BOOKLEARNIN'?  This, the eighth T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by the SQL Soldier, Robert Davis (Blog | Twitter) and he's asking how we learn and how we teach. How I Learned Throughout my school years I seem to have been assigned a disproportionate number of "old-school" teachers who could be extremely harsh, often utilizing the "tough love" form of teaching.  Some examples: My third grade teacher's common form of punishment was making the student copy a page selected at random from the dictionary.  The entire page, including any illustrations and pronunciations.  Students who mouthed-off to here would…
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09 Jul 2010
By Bob Pusateri

Elevator Etiquette

Thoughts
And now for something completely different.  I realize there's probably been countless thoughts, blog posts and jokes on the subject of elevator etiquette, but I think mine's a little different as it concerns whether or not using the elevator is polite in certain situations.  Allow me to explain: In college I spent the better part of my years living in the residence halls.  The particular complex I was in consisted of 2 connected buildings.  The building for guys had 5 floors, while the girls had 12.  The elevators were incredibly slow, to the point where it was usually faster to…
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08 Jul 2010
By Bob Pusateri

Review: MozyHome Remote Backup

Cloud Storage, Software
In a previous post, I talked about disaster recovery strategies for the home and promised reviews on the services I use. Today I'll take a look at Mozy. I've been a satisfied Mozy customer since March of 2007.  I've yet to have a bad experience with it, and as I write this I currently have about 45GB of my stuff stored with them. Versions & Pricing Mozy comes in 2 flavors, MozyHome for home users, and MozyPro for businesses.  MozyPro's additional features include a different pricing structure, 24x7 phone support, the ability to backup network drives, and the ability to…
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06 Jul 2010
By Bob Pusateri

Optimizing for Ad hoc Workloads

Configuration, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication
One of the nifty features available in SQL Server 2008 is the "Optimize for Ad hoc Workloads" option, which is at the instance level.  If your workload involves a high number of ad hoc queries that are used only once, your plan cache (also known as the "procedure cache") may benefit from enabling this feature.  (There are, of course, other solutions to this issue as well, a primary one being to use less ad-hoc SQL and more stored procedures, but that may not always be possible.) What it does SQL Server has an upper limit on the size of its…
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01 Jul 2010
By Bob Pusateri

Disaster Recovery Strategies for the Home

Cloud Storage
A key function of a DBA is to plan, test, and implement disaster recovery policies for the databases they maintain.  DBAs lacking these skills may also find themselves lacking a job if they are unable to recover data when necessary.  For all these skills we apply in the workplace, I have still heard via Twitter a few tales of woe regarding lost data in the home. Having a disaster recovery strategy for your personal data is every bit as important as having one at work - maybe even more so because your precious memories are at stake.  I don't have…
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