Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–7 Apr 2020

    Last week went a little crazy, and I learned something: don’t post a Zoom link on Twitter. My apologies to anyone that wanted to join and had things go sideways. It took me about five minutes to mute everyone and kick people off.

    We ended up having a great call with just 4 of us, and it was good to touch base and talk through some of the changes in the world.

    This week I’m going to continue with the call. We had very little technical discussion, and I’m going to skip a technical theme this week and stick with a general touch base, health check, and community connection focus. We’re going to try and keep things civil and interesting.

    To try and prevent any craziness, I’m going to put a password on the meeting. Those of you that are data professionals should be able to answer this question for the password: what is the name of the type of index that isn’t stored in a row store? Enter just the first part, lower case (Hint: ______store index).

    The meeting isn’t hotlinked on purpose, as it’s not a complete URL. Zoom security is a thing.

    Call Details:

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–31 Mar 2020

    I’m hosting another live T-SQL Tuesday event tomorrow, which is really just a casual video meeting for anyone that wants to join and take a break from work, life, or anything else.

    In this time of difficulty, I think this is a great coping mechanism that might help you keep in touch with the community. I know it’s certainly good for my mental health.

    This week the theme is: Securely connecting

    Most of us are remote now, and we’re often at home. This can prevent some challenges. Networking aside, security is still a concern. What you are doing? Jump boxes, rdp to servers or your desktop at work or something else?

    We’ll start with this theme, but we’ll see where the conversation goes. We’ll also do a health check with people, talk about anything good that’s happened?

    I’ll use Zoom with this meeting URL: Removed (see the most recent post for the URL)

    The date: Tuesday, March 24, 2020, and time:

    • 13:00MDT
    • 15:00EDT
    • 19:00UTC

    Just an hour. Jump on, say hi, give us your thoughts, problems, or just listen.

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–A Neat Solution

    Travel is limited, or banned, in many cases these days. Events are cancelled or postponed, and there is a limit to how much contact we should have with each other. That’s hard in many ways, and it’s a challenge.

    I’ve been working at home for 17 years and it’s hard for me. This is a big change and there’s a need for adjustment for many of us, myself included. To give you a chance to step away from work, I’m taking a page from Mike Walsh and Straightpath Solutions. I’m going to set up a T-SQL Tuesday live meeting on Tuesday. I’m going to take an hour during the time I’d often eat lunch and run a virtual water cooler and run a virtual T-SQL Tuesday live meeting.

    I’ll use Zoom with this meeting URL: Removed (see the most recent post for the URL)

    The date: Tuesday, March 24, 2020

    • 13:00MDT
    • 15:00EDT
    • 19:00UTC.

    Rather than just a random get together, though we can talk about anything, I’m going to set a base topic and hope some of you come to participate with some thoughts.

    This week, Mar 24, I’m going to set the topic to be this:

    What’s a neat solution you found recently to a problem?

    This could be work related or not. Technical or non-technical. We’ll let the discussion go where it goes.

    If you’re looking for a little community contact, feel free to join me on Tuesdays. I’ll post a new topic each Monday that can think about.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #124–Query Store in Action

    tsqltuesdayToday is T-SQL Tuesday #124 and I’m dropping a quick post as I’ve had lots of other stuff to do since returning from my sabbatical. Tracy Boggiano is the host this time and she asks about Query  Store.

    A Quick Review

    I don’t use Query Store (QDS) much. I don’t have to deal with the production operations much, and really, I’m not supposed to worry about the SSC servers. We sometimes have bad plans and bad code, but it doesn’t affect the performance of the servers overall (we’re over provisioned) and we use SQLServerCentral as part of our SQL Monitor demo site, so we want some bad stuff showing up.

    5129kPl5kCLGrant wrote a book, SQL Server Query Store in Action, that is on the Kindle Unlimited list. Since I subscribe, I grabbed this last year and dug in on a few airplane flights to see if I’d missed anything about how the QDS works.

    It’s a good intro look at what the QDS is, how it works, and how you can get information out of it. Grant does a good job of digging into the DMVs and helping you to understand what happens outside of the SSMS GUI.

    Grant and our host, Tracy, have another Query Store book that goes into more detail ( and it more recent) if you want to learn more.

    Overall, this is a good basic look at QDS. If you want to get started, and subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, give this a look.