1 DBA's Professional Blog
A powerful little expression in SQL Server is the CASE statement. The CASE statement has the ability to “transform” data per business rules to help better understand the data in a given query. In the simplest form, the CASE statement is a statement that evaluates a list of conditions (in order) and returns the first matching result expressions.
One of the frequently required job functions of the database administrator is to track disk space consumption. Whether this requirement comes from management or from a learning opportunity after a production outage, the need exists.
One of my biggest reasons why I do what I do, boils down to the challenges that I frequently get to encounter. There is a wild satisfaction to working on a very difficult and challenging task, product, tool, profession, skill, etc. This satisfaction often involves reward and a sense of accomplishment.
Anybody that has interviewed for a job has most likely run into the trick question. Some interviewers like to throw out multiple trick questions all in an effort to trip up the candidate and get the candidate to doubt him/her self.
The defaults in the msdb database are about what is missing. It’s missing quite a few things that could be critical to your environment.
One probably seldom thinks of the SQL Agent jobs scheduled on the SQL Server instance – unless they fail. What if the job failed because something was changed in the job? Maybe you knew about the change, maybe you didn’t.
One of the things that should seem very commonplace to a data professional is the effort to become a lazy DBA. A lazy DBA is not a bad thing. It just means the DBA works hard to automate the repetitive mundane tasks that may be tedious and/or time consuming.
It isn’t very often that one would consider a short circuit to be a desired outcome. In SQL Server we have a cool exception to that rule – Extended Events (XE).
Thanks to Extended Events (XE), we have access to a guide of sorts that will help us better understand if our shiny new tool (automatic tuning) is operating as desired.
There are many useful targets within SQL Server’s Extended Events. Of all of the targets, the most daunting is probably the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) target. The ETW target represents doing something that is new for most DBAs which means spending a lot of time trying to learn the technology and figure out the little nuances and the difficulties that it can present.