I wanted to give a little background on the legal status of PASS. The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) is an American corporation chartered in the state of Illinois. In America a corporation has to be chartered in a particular state. It has to abide by the laws of…
While you’re reading this, a post should be going up on the PASS blog [http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/PASSBlog.aspx] on the plans to change our bylaws. You should be able to find our old bylaws, our proposed bylaws and a red-lined version of the changes. We plan…
One of the challenges I struggle with is keeping a good "to do" list of things I need to do on the various SQL Servers I support. I have servers that I don't visit on a regular basis so my situation may be different than many…
People have uploaded nearly one millions rows of trace data to TraceTune [http://www.tracetune.com/]. That’s enough data to start to look at the results in aggregate. The first thing I want to look at is logical reads. This is the easiest metric to identify and fix. When…
I subscribe to and read over 100 SQL Server blogs every day. I link to posts that I think are interesting [http://www.sqlteam.com/sql-server-links.aspx]. I also read a fair number of non-SQL Server blogs. Here are a few that I think are interesting. danah boyd [http://www.…
The ERC has released a draft (or strawman as I like to say) of how we might select the Nominating Committee for the PASS elections [http://erc.sqlpass.org/Forums/aft/30.aspx]. If you’d like to comment on this, now is the time.…
I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board. I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance. There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something…
We have a requirement to build a test environment where certain tables get reset from production every night. These are mainly lookup tables. I played around with all kinds of fancy solutions and finally settled on a series of MERGE statements. And being lazy I didn’t want to write…
I wanted an easier way to identify queries I’d already looked at so I could skip them. I’ve been entering comments for each query as I review it. These comments typically fall into three categories: a change I made, no easy fix available or something needs to be…
When I get to a new client I usually find myself using the same set of scripts for maintenance and troubleshooting. These are all drop in solutions for various maintenance issues. Reindexing. I use Michelle Ufford’s (SQLFool) re-indexing script [http://sqlfool.com/2010/04/index-defrag-script-v4-0/]. I like that it…