Author: Jeff Iannucci

How I applied 13 cumulative updates in 12 minutes

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 15 Comments

Twitter is a strange place. I mean, aside from all the outrage practice and animal videos.

Last week I sent out a tweet about how I used dbatools to update apply cumulative updates to 13 SQL Server instance in 12 minutes. It got nine retweets and over 40 likes. Now, 40 likes in the grand scheme isn’t much, but for a guy like me with a handful of followers – it certainly gets your attention.

In one of the replies I was asked to put a post together about how I did such a thing (the updates, not the tweet), so here we are. If you’ve never used PowerShell, this might be where you could start. It’s absurdly simple. I mean, it was only five lines in PowerShell, and you could easily do it in less than that.

Continue reading →

Find and fix that troublesome Windows Power setting

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 8 Comments

For the most part, the default configurations for SQL Server are pretty good. Yeah, there are a few you should definitely change (like say, the ones involving parallelism), but most of the others can be, uh, good enough as is.

But no one really likes “good enough,” right?

So most of us tweak some of these defaults to improve performance. Measure, adjust, document improvement, get a raise. Rinse repeat. And of course, if you’ve spend any time in SQL Server circles you’ll quickly learn one of the biggest improvements we can make for SQL Server isn’t even in SQL Server. It’s the Windows Power setting, which by default is set to “if you don’t need anything right now I’m gonna lay my processors down for a rest.”

Continue reading →

For those who want to be a Junior DBA

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been fortunate to have spoken at a few SQL Saturday events this year, and one of the sessions I’ve had the pleasure of presenting has been about getting familiar with the SELECT statement. It’s a basic session designed for folks who haven’t yet started writing T-SQL, or are who have tried a bit but may seem confused. The session has been well attended, presumably because most people end up having to learn T-SQL on their own.

Then again, maybe it’s all movie references in the session.

Continue reading →

So, my first SQL Saturday presentation had some issues

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new post here, and that’s largely due to the quantity of other things on which I’ve been working. This list of busy-ness – presumably completely uninteresting to you – includes making additional presentations for SQL Server training events.

Which makes for a nice intro to what I wanted to write about today – my first session I presented at a SQL Saturday last weekend in Orange County, California. I suppose some may read this a cautionary tale, but my intention is to let you know that even when you’re neck deep in the weeds (and I’m not even talking just about presentations here) you can still survive as long as you focus on one thing: delivering solutions to your audience.

But before I get to the parts where things went wrong…

Continue reading →

Failovers can’t serve two masters

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 4 Comments

As I’m sure you’re aware, the career path for a SQL Server DBA is a wonderful journey of growing your catalog of knowledge through unexpected lessons. For example: Did you find out the hard way you need to test restoring those backups? Did you discover you need to enable the dedicated admin connection after a server locked up? Did you learn the unexpected results of using reserved words as object names?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Speaking of reserved words, I recently learned there’s a bit of a situation regarding a certain word and logical file names. Let me tell you a story.

Continue reading →

PASS Summit 2018 brain dump

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 1 Comment

Much like your paycheck, this post is two weeks after the fact. But also like your paycheck, it’s got a good deal of personal importance. I’ve taken a couple weeks to let the experience of attending my first PASS Summit marinate in my brain sauce, and now I’m ready to server up my thoughts.

You know what? Scratch that analogy. That’s a little too Hannibal Lecter.

So after fumbling the opening, here’s what I remember about PASS Summit.

Continue reading →

Batching data manipulation is great as long as you do it correctly

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 1 Comment

As Sinatra was fond of singing, “regrets, I’ve had a few.” And one of those came this week immediately after my presentation. This isn’t to say the presentation didn’t go well – it did. At least I think it did. I had several people come up and thank me afterwards for showing them things they didn’t know previously, so in that sense it went well.

But in hindsight, one part of it, well, it sucked. So I’m going to take a moment here and now to correct that.

Continue reading →