Survival Techniques for the lone DBA (Pass Summit 2019 Conference Day 2)

Survival Techniques for the lone DBA (Pass Summit 2019 Conference Day 2)

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On Thursday morning at PASS Summit I went to Monica Rathbun’s session about survival strategies for the lone DBA. This was one of the best sessions I have been to at the Summit and definitely struck a nerve. Many things Monica talked about were well resonating with me as I already went down the same path like leveraged free tools, sucked in as much online training as I could regarding SQL server, went to SQLSaturdays and usergroup meetings and regularly…

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Cybersecurity is everyone’s problem: An extract from the Keynote of Day 2 at Pass Summit

Cybersecurity is everyone’s problem: An extract from the Keynote of Day 2 at Pass Summit

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Wow it’s getting a habit now to write a blog in the later evening about the great PASS Summit currently taking place in Seattle. I simply hope that what I write up here can be useful for anybody else as well…so please give me a short feedback if you like these kind of blog posts or let me know what I could do better. Note: I have just got to know that Kenneth Fisher has a far more extensive writeup…

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Pass Summit 2019: Conference Day 1

Pass Summit 2019: Conference Day 1

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Today was the first conference day at PASS Summit. Originally I expected the venue to be much more crowded and that there would be some sessions packed with people standing in the back. Most surprisingly it was quite a nice experience and no session I visited had people standing but instead a good share of free seats left. However Markus Ehrenmüller-Jensen told me that he has been to really packed sessions and it often is difficult for the organizers to…

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Pass Summit 2019 PreCon Day 2: The SQL Server 2019 Workshop with Bob Ward

Pass Summit 2019 PreCon Day 2: The SQL Server 2019 Workshop with Bob Ward

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I am still at PASS Summit in Seattle, USA and today was the second day of preconference sessions. I took the SQL Server 2019 Workshop by Bob Ward and would like to share a few things. As with my previous post on Day 1 please be kind in your judgement…it has been a long day and I am just gonna write about some short and most impressive takeaways. So first of all, what was that all about? It was nothing…

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Bertelsmann AI Hackdays: What made my team successful

Bertelsmann AI Hackdays: What made my team successful

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TLDR Dear potential reader: I realize that this blog post is quite long and everyone’s time is limited nowadays. I am still excited about the result of the Hackdays and the solution I helped to build. So I tried to share as much as possible with you. Feel free to skip over some headings faster and delve into details in other paragraphs. My message is that contributing successfully to a hacking event is absolutely doable even if you are not…

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Pass Summit 2019 Precon Day 1: Performance Tuning With Query Store in SQL Server (Erin Stellato)

Pass Summit 2019 Precon Day 1: Performance Tuning With Query Store in SQL Server (Erin Stellato)

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I am currently at the PASS Summit in Seattle, USA. This is a great conference for data professionals. Actually I am already fast asleep as it is like 2:40am in Germany by now. However I would like to use the chance to write up some quick learnings. The day was terrific. Erin Stellato  delivered a great workshop. Here’s a picture of me with Erin Stellato: I would like to share two (rather easy) things which were new to me: Query Store…

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Why I chose int rather than bigint for ID columns

Why I chose int rather than bigint for ID columns

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This is my contribution to TSQL Tuesday #99: Dealer’s Choice hosted by Aaron Bertrand this month. I choose door #2 to write about T-SQL bad habits. One thing that comes to my mind immediately is how to handle id columns and which data type to choose. First of all: I don’t think there is any one-size-fits-all-approach you could use without thinking twice. My experience is based on working for a mid-sized business with fairly small sized tables which rarely have…

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What I like about PowerShell

What I like about PowerShell

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Introduction First of all, I do not consider myself a professional let alone an expert on PowerShell. However, I think the learning curve of PowerShell is very appealing especially if you have got some background in programming. The first programming language I learned was Java…way back in 2005 at University. Well, frankly speaking my first programming language was Basic on a Commodore C128 computer…but that time as a teen I didn’t really get a deep understanding and ended up retyping…

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SQL Server transaction log and the need for roll backs and roll forwards

SQL Server transaction log and the need for roll backs and roll forwards

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A few days ago Kendra Little did a great Podcast about Write Ahead Logging in SQL Server. Key point is that all transactions are written to the transaction log first and then to the data file. This enables SQL server to fulfil the Durability requirement (one of the ACID properties of transactions). Kendra did a good job of explaining but I didn’t get her right the first time and did some research myself on roll backs and roll forwards. The…

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Baselining queries

Baselining queries

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The problem During the last few months I have done a lot of performance tuning. Being thrown in at the deep end I did my best and boldly changed existing indexes. Our server had problems regarding too much IO done therefore it didn’t seem right to just add one new index after another. However, doing this for the first time I happened to change an index which made the one query perform better but another query I have tuned a…

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