-
Jan 1, 2025 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
I’ve had lots of wish lists over the years, from Ladybug to Connect to UserVoice, and very few of my dreams ever come true. Still, it’s fun every once in a while, to be whimsical about the way I wished SQL Server worked. Especially in January because, you know, new beginnings. So here are a few ideas that have crossed my mind recently:I am constantly fiddling with indexes on our biggest database.
-
Aug 2, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
I recently had to help support synchronization and distribution of workloads between multiple servers. Some of this work involves Task Scheduler and, be honest, who knew Task Scheduler was this complicated? On different servers, we wanted jobs to trigger on different days of the week.
-
Jul 22, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
I’m not the first person to write about cleaning up unused or redundant indexes. You can read many articles about how non-clustered indexes are expensive to store and maintain, that they can occupy valuable space in memory, and that they can negatively impact the performance of the write portion of any SQL Server workload. There are great scripts out there already – like sp_BlitzIndex – that can help identify index issues without any grunt work. So, nothing new in this area.
-
Jul 8, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
I’ve talked about it before; you shouldn’t have a backup strategy, you should have a recovery strategy. I can’t possibly care if my backups succeed if I’m not bothering to test that they can be restored. And if they can’t be restored then, both technically and practically, I don’t have backups. In one of the systems I manage, they built a very simple “test restore” process long before I became involved.
-
May 27, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand |Ben Johnston |Edward Pollack
Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ]In the previous posts in this series, I described how I have optimized a long-running set of routines by processing databases, tables, and even subsets of tables in parallel.
-
May 15, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand |Ben Johnston |Edward Pollack
Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ]In part 2 of this series, I showed an example implementation of distributing a long-running workload in parallel, in order to finish faster. In reality, though, this involves more than just restoring databases. And I have significant skew to deal with: one database that is many times larger than all the rest and has a higher growth rate.
-
Apr 15, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
In my previous post, I showed how to borrow a snake draft concept from fantasy football, or a packing technique from the shipping industry, to distribute different portions of a workload to run in parallel. In the previous example, we determined a distribution order for databases based on size – though you can rank by literally any attribute (or combination of attributes).
-
Apr 12, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
I recently had a restore job where I needed to split the work up into multiple parallel processes (which I’ll refer to here as “threads”). I wanted to balance the work so that the duration was something significantly less than the sum of the restore times. Imagine a job that loops through and restores each database in sequence (let’s start with just four):The restores are not finished (allowing the next step(s) to start) until the sum of the restore times for all four databases.
-
Apr 7, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Louis Davidson |Aaron Bertrand
As a data professional, there is a set of tools that you use on pretty much a daily basis. Before I started as the editor of Simple-Talk, there were two Microsoft tools I used every day of the work week, and also for my hobby work: SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) and SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools). I wrote a lot of T-SQL and a lot of SSIS packages.
-
Mar 25, 2024 | 
red-gate.com | Aaron Bertrand
Pagination is a technique for limiting output. Think of Google search results, shopping the electronics category on Amazon, or browsing tagged questions on Stack Overflow. Nobody could consume all of the results in a single shot, and no site wants to spend the resources required to present them all to us, so we are offered a manageable set of results (a “page”) at a time. In the most basic cases, we can implement this functionality in SQL Server by using OFFSET/FETCH.
