“If three people are responsible for feeding the dog, the dog is going to starve. You must have clear areas of responsibility.” In his book Risk, retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal shared this quote. It’s from a mentor he had as a young officer. And It helped shape his career. As a family…
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In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded with a never-ending stream of urgent tasks and deadlines. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind and lose sight of the big picture. This is where inertia comes into play. And inertia can put your SQL Servers at risk. How urgency creates inertia Inertia is…
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I’m not really a car guy. My daily driver is 10 years old but it serves me well. It’s reliable. It gets me where I want to go and back again. And I want to keep it that way so I maintain it. I change the oil regularly, I rotate the tires almost as often,…
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I sliced into an avocado while making lunch recently. The size of the seed compared to the fruit was shocking! It was huge. There was only a thin layer of fruit surrounding a large, bulbous seed. Interestingly, some avocados are just the opposite – the seed is tiny compared to the amount of fruit inside.…
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Do you schedule DBCC CHECKDB for all of your important databases? Scheduling database integrity checks ranks right up there with backing up your databases when it comes to glamorous activities in the life of a DBA. That is to say, it’s not glamorous at all. Integrity checks don’t bring the same internal swagger as say…
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Don’t sweat the small stuff, they say. That’s good advice. Much of the time. But with SQL Server, the small stuff is worth sweating. In fact, the small stuff can be big. Letting the small stuff go In life, the small stuff can weigh you down. Worrying about things that don’t really matter can strip…
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How many tempdb data files should a SQL Server have? And where should they live? What about their growth settings? Should it be by percent? Or, should they grow by a certain size each time? Are there other tempdb configuration settings I should be concerned with? In short: how should I configure my SQL Server…
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Have you seen the job boards recently? Hiring an experienced full-time DBA is expensive. And many companies simply cannot justify that kind of spend for a full time DBA, especially if they have fewer than a couple of dozen instances of SQL Servers in production. The result? Many companies are working without a SQL Server…
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Hardening and protecting your SQL Server environment is not a one-and-done task. It’s a continuous process. Things change. New Applications are added. Logins come and go. Servers are migrated. In such a dynamic environment, auditing data access in your SQL Server environment is critical. If you are responsible for SQL Servers, you likely ask: Who…
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You’re cleaning up some old usernames in a database. The users are no longer needed so you want to drop them and maybe even the server login. You issue the standard DROP USER username; command in the query editor and it immediately comes back with Msg 15138, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The database…
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