FUN FACT: I have been a Microsoft Certified Professional for SQL Server for over 20 years. Second FUN FACT: the last time I took a Microsoft certification exam was 1999. Add these two together and you can probably deduce I had most recently passed exams relating to SQL Server 7.0

Oddly enough, I am 100% sure these facts have no current bearing on my abilities or career prospects.

Anyhow, after contemplating how in 2019 I had completed my university studies (at long last!) and had started presenting sessions relating to SQL Server, I decided the next challenge to tackle would be passing some current Microsoft certification exams. I figured if I am going to be speaking about the subject publicly I should probably see if I needed to fill in some knowledge gaps.

As it turned out preparing and passing the first exam took me just a handful of weeks. If you’ve recently considered taking this exam yourself, let me share with you how I did this.

Continue reading “How I passed the 70-761 certification exam” →

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 “How I applied 13 cumulative updates in 12 minutes” →

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 “Find and fix that troublesome Windows Power setting” →

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 “So, my first SQL Saturday presentation had some issues” →

Maybe more people would use the Central Management Server feature of Management Studio if it had a name that didn’t sound as utilitarian as a heat pump. Something like PowerServer. Or…Mega Instance Policy Ranger. Or…One Query To Rule Them All.

Because that’s what it really is.

Continue reading “Central Management Server – not just three boring words” →

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 “Failovers can’t serve two masters” →

Remember the Bill Gates email hoax? The one that claims to be some sort of Microsoft beta test saying Gates is going to pay cash money to anyone who forwards the email? I’m pretty sure it’s been around as long as actual email.

You knew that wasn’t real, right? It’s a myth. And speaking of perpetuated myths…

Continue reading “Don’t believe the myth TRUNCATE TABLE isn’t logged” →