Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Watch SQL in the City Streamed September 2018

    I’m over in the UK and we have SQL in the City Streamed tomorrow. This is our September edition, and Grant, Kathi, and myself are prepping today.

    We also have a special guest this time, Rob Richardson. Rob is a fantastic software developer and fellow MVP. I’m looking forward to seeing his new talk on the Microsoft stack and automated deployments.

    Check out the registration pages and schedule as we’ve got a variety of talks. This time we have a bit of Redgate focus, but many of these talks are more generic, useful technical talks that you will find informative.

    Register, block out your calendar, and join us tomorrow, Sept 5, for the next SQL in the City Streamed.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #106 – Trigger Headaches or Happiness

    tsqltuesdaySince I took over the T-SQL Tuesday a few months ago, I decided I ought to host again. Especially since I’ve done it twice, but Wayne Sheffield got his third spot last month. Gotta keep up with Mr. Sheffield.

    Triggers, for fun and frustration

    I’ve been working with SQL Server and T-SQL a long time, and across many jobs, I think I’ve ended up using triggers in 0.01% of my tables or less. They can be a useful and helpful construct, but they can also be problematic and difficult, especially in the age of changing business models and rules.

    Since I’ve found triggers to be both helpful and hurtful, I decided to ask you to write about an experience you’ve had with triggers. Either good or bad, but let me know this month what stands out in your mind.

    The Rules

    As always, the rules for this month are simple.

    • Write and publish a post on September 11, 2018, UTC time.
    • Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo (you can grab this above) and link your post back to this invitation.
    • Leave a comment/pingback on this post for me to use to include you in the roundup
    • Have fun.

  • Custom Data Purging in SQL Monitor

    In talking to a customer recently, they were worried about the amount of data kept by SQL Monitor. That’s a fair concern as monitoring a large number of servers can result in lots of data.

    As an aside, data management is one of the reasons that I’d always want to buy a monitoring tool from a vendor. Most people don’t get this right and it’s a pain to deal with. I’d like you to look at SQL Monitor, but if it doesn’t work for you, look at our competitors. More people need monitoring on their systems.

    In any case, this customer wanted to ensure some data was removed, but not other data. Their concern was that things like performance data or storage data might be needed for a long time while alert data or top queries might not. In other words, customized data management is needed.

    I posted the suggestion in the SQL Monitor Slack channel, asking the developers if they were considering it. In about 5-10 minutes, I got this link: https://monitor.red-gate.com/Configuration/Purging

     2018-08-23 12_15_16-Configuration _ Data purging

    Shazam! They’d already done it.

    Actually, they’ve released this to frequent updaters, but in an upcoming release, this will be the default. You’ll be able to customize how long you want to keep each kind of data. Not by machine (yet), but if you need that, let us know.

    SQL Monitor continues to amaze me with their progress. If you want to get an idea of how it works, check out monitor.red-gate.com, our demo site, where we monitor some real servers at Redgate, including the SQLServerCentral database instances.

    And if you want it in your enterprise, download a trial today.

  • Next week is SQL in the City Streamed

    This picture is out of date. I’ll make sure we get a new one next week at SQL in the City Streamed that includes Kendra Little.

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    On Sept 5th, is SQL in the City Streamed. Register today and watch us talk about Azure, Machine Learning, full stack development, and more. We’ll talk a little Redgate as well.

    sitc-201809-social-grant (1)

    I’m off today to Norway for SQL Saturday Oslo, but I’ll also be prepping for SQL in the City Streamed. Hope to see you online.