Articles having tag: DATABASE ADMINISTRATION

A first look at SQL Server 2012 Availability Group Wait Statistics

If you are trouble-shooting an AlwaysOn Availability Group topology, a study of the wait statistics will give a pointer to many of the causes of problems. Although several wait types are documented, there is nothing like practical experiment to familiarize...

SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn

By Warwick Rudd

SQL Server AlwaysOn provides a high-availability and Disaster-recovery solution for SQL Server 2012. It makes use of existing SQL Server features, particularly Failover Clustering, and provides new capabilities such as availability groups. Warwick Rudd explains...

Handling Deadlocks in SQL Server

By Jonathan Kehayias

In this excerpt from his book Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for the Accidental DBA, Jonathan Kehayias provides a guide to identifying the causes, reacting to, and ultimately preventing the dreaded deadlock.

SQL Server Transaction Log Fragmentation: a Primer

By Greg Larsen

Generally, you will have no need to worry about the number of virtual log files in your transaction log. However, if you use the default settings for 'auto-grow', you can end up with such 'fragmentation' in your transaction log as to affect performance noticably....

Big Data is Just a Fad

By Buck Woody

The Term 'Big Data' is nothing more than a fad, and we'll soon be cringing with embarrassment at the thought that we ever used it. However, the data, and the challenges to processing it that it presents, will stay with us. If jargon like 'Big Data' helps us...

Generating Data for Database Tests

By Phil Factor

It is more and more essential for developers to work on development databases that have realistic data in both type and quantity, but without using real data. It isn't exactly easy, even with third-party tools to hand. Phil Factor shows how it can be done,...

No Significant Fragmentation? Look Closer…

By Luciano Moreira

If you are relying on using 'best-practice' percentage-based thresholds when you are creating an index maintenance plan for a SQL Server that checks the fragmentation in your pages, you may miss occasional 'edge' conditions on larger tables that will cause...

The Road to Professional Database Development: Set-Based Thinking

By Peter Larsson

Under the pseudonym of 'SwePeso', Peter Larsson is famous on SQL forums for the amazing performance he can get from SQL. How does he do it? In the first of a series of articles, Peter explains his secrets.

Automated Script-generation with Powershell and SMO

By Phil Factor

In the first of a series of articles on automating the process of building, modifying and copying SQL Server databases, Phil Factor demonstrates how one can generate TSQL scripts for databases, selected database objects, or table contents from PowerShell and...

Converting String Data to XML and XML to String Data

By Robert Sheldon

We all appreciate that, in general, XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, auch as...