A few years ago I published an article about how to use linked servers to avoid performance issues. I wanted to follow up on that with a discussion of linked server security configuration because this is another big issue I see all too often with linked servers.
The first thing to understand is that all linked […]
Orlando in April, and then you add SQL on top of that? What’s not to like?
I’m really excited to be part of the Spring SQLIntersection event, coming up April 18-21 at the Walt Disney World Swan. SSG was an exhibitor at the Spring 2015 event, and at the Vegas event last fall, I had the […]
As you may have heard, Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison recently decided to not allow his sons to keep participation trophies they had received from, apparently, Next Level. For Harrison, and his kids, only earned trophies will be kept.
The idea of awarding every child, regardless of talent or contribution, a trophy or medal for merely […]
“It was the best of database consulting times…it was the worst of database consulting times…”
One of the most common things we do here at SSG is help new customers who have hired us because they have run into big problems, usually performance related. In many of these cases, there is either no DBA on staff […]
The topic for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday (Giving Back to the SQL Server Community) is one that is near and dear to me so I figured this would be a great way to finally get started participating in T-SQL Tuesday. Blogging is something I haven’t been very consistent with so I guess my first commitment […]
One of the things we see as consultants are consistent patterns of behavior by T-SQL developers that cause big performance problems. I call these anti-patterns and thought some blog articles on the big ones I see over and over again would be a good thing.
Today I want to talk about User Defined Functions (UDFs). UDFs […]
I’ve seen this question a few times and it is something that can be very confusing: You’ve installed SQL 2014 (a full version, not Express) and selected all components, yet when you go to your SQL Server 2014 program group, you can’t find SQL Server Data Tools.
In all versions of SQL Server between 2005 and […]
There is a popular practice among developers to use globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) as primary keys. At first glance, it seems like a great solution. They are guaranteed to be unique and can be generated anywhere, avoiding a round trip to the database just to get the unique key. While this sounds great in theory, […]
One of the requirements of ETL is ensuring that bad data does not cause the whole ETL process to stop with an error. Failure to do this results in a very brittle process in which one row of bad data can cause a whole day’s worth of data loading to fail. My favorite war story […]
This Thursday, December 6, 2012, the SQL PASS Performance Virtual Chapter will be holding online sessions all day long in an the first ever Performance Palooza!. There are eight one-hour online sessions, covering a variety of performance related topics. It is a fantastic speaker line-up, of which I feel privileged to be part of. All […]
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