Konrad Dujka SQL Server DBAs—even those who have years of experience with relational databases—frequently make the same mistakes repeatedly. Wouldn’t you like to learn about those blunders so that you can sidestep them? Well, I have good news! In a recent webinar, I counted down the 10 most common SQL Server mistakes DBAs make. Read below as I recap … Read more Top 10 SQL Server Mistakes Made by DBAs
One of the most fundamental concepts in any relational database management system (RDBMS), such as SQL Server, is the transaction. During my consulting career, I’ve seen many performance problems caused by developers not understanding how transactions work in SQL Server. In this tutorial, I’ll explain what transactions are, why they’re necessary, and how they work … Read more A Complete Introduction to SQL Server Transactions
One of the easier ways to improve the performance of your SQL Server and Azure SQL database queries is to ensure you choose the right data types for your data, and the data types in your application’s code match the ones in your stored procedures and queries. Choosing the right data type conserves space, because … Read more How Data Types and Query Tuning Can Improve Application Performance
Many organizations have migrated their environments from on-premises to the cloud, and one of the clouds of choice is Microsoft Azure. For SQL Server workloads, organizations can use platform as a service solutions with features like Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance or infrastructure as a service solutions with Azure SQL virtual machines. Azure SQL virtual … Read more How to Make SQL Server Faster on Azure VMs
There are a large number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, SQL Server settings, coding practices, SQL wait types, and so on that can affect performance. For this post I decided to … Read more 10 SQL Server Performance Tuning Best Practices
Storage is one of the most critical components for any relational database management system, and getting the right storage configuration affects reliability, availability, and performance. When it comes to SQL Server storage best practices, choosing between storage hardware options has changed significantly over the last decade, but that doesn’t necessarily make choosing the correct storage … Read more SQL Server Storage Best Practices: Choosing Storage Options
Managing any database ecosystem is difficult enough: taking backups, maintaining statistics, and doing performance tuning all tax the time of the DBA or database developer. The job is complex even without considering the work you do to manage the various schema and data drifts that can occur. Unless you operate in a vacuum or within … Read more Spotting and Avoiding Database Drift
One of the easiest ways to increase query performance in SQL Server is to make sure it can quickly access the requested data as efficiently as possible. In SQL Server, using one or more indexes can be exactly the fix you need. In fact, indexes are so important, SQL Server can warn you when it … Read more Indexing Strategies for SQL Server Performance
The performance of your applications is a complex, multi-layered puzzle. Performance can be negatively impacted at the application layer or even by remote calls to networked services. However, the most common bottleneck for applications is the data storage layer. The most common data storage tier for applications is a relational database, whose performance can vary … Read more Basic SQL Server Query Tuning Secrets Every SQL Admin Should Know
During our recent SentryOne Accelerate 2020 virtual conference, I led a cloud migration panel discussion with several SQL Server experts. I asked the panelists to imagine they were riding in an elevator and someone turned to them and said, “You are really good at managing SQL Server. What tips do you have for someone like … Read more Cloud Migration Tips from SQL Server Experts