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Released with SQL Server 2016, Query Data Store (QDS) was a game changer for performance tuning. Right from Microsoft’s website: The SQL Server Query Store feature provides you with insight on query plan choice and performance. It simplifies performance troubleshooting by helping you quickly find performance differences caused by query plan changes. Query Store automatically captures a history of queries, plans, and runtime statistics, and retains these for your review. It separates data by time windows so you can see database usage patterns and understand when query plan changes happened on the server. [Read More]

Thank you all for your service! I was fortunate to have attended PASS Summit again this year. As an added bonus they had a Birds of a Feather luncheon table for Veterans every day. I sat at the table every day and met a number of different veterans from all branches of service. I even met someone who had served in the British Army. It was wonderful to sit around a table and share war stories with you all. [Read More]

I was at SQL Saturday 723 in Rochester, NY last weekend. I was selected to deliver 2 sessions, and I planned to fill the rest of my schedule watching other session during the day. Overall this was another great SQL Saturday. But that’s not why I’m here today… A new session emerged in the lunch timeslot this year. The Women in Technology Panel Discussion. This is the first time SQL Saturday Rochester has ever done a Women in Technology panel. [Read More]

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community. This year I’m excited to give 2 presentations! Painting with PowerShell. I’ve given this presentation before and am excited to be able to do it here again. My newest presentation is about the nuances of Running SQL Server in Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). [Read More]

This month’s topic: Folks Who Have Made a Difference T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community (or Microsoft Data Platform community. Although it’s called T-SQL Tuesday, it’s not limited to SQL Server database engine only). It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (blog | twitter). This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Ewald Cress (blog | twitter). From his blog post: This month’s topic: Who inspires you in the data community? [Read More]

This month’s topic: Let’s get all Posh – What are you going to automate today? T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community (or Microsoft Data Platform community. Although it’s called T-SQL Tuesday, it’s not limited to SQL Server database engine only). It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (blog | twitter). This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Rob Sewell (blog | twitter). From his blog post: [Read More]

Today I learned that you can configure tempdb in RDS! One of the things we DBA’s do is configure tempdb to have multiple data files (if needed). Not going to go into the depths of why in this post, but adding multiple data files can help alleviate contention in tempdb. Until today I didn’t think you could do this in RDS. I guess I hadn’t even tried because you can’t do anything to master, model or the msdb databases, so I just assumed tempdb was off limits as well. [Read More]

Beware the automated backup window when running native SQL Server backups in RDS If you’ve ever fired up an RDS instance you know you can set an automated backup window for your instance. During this window Amazon will kick off an automated snapshot of your RDS instance each day. Set it and forget it. Kinda nice. Backups are good, right? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/SQLServer.Procedural.Importing.html Once you have enabled native SQL backup/restore, using them is very straight forward. [Read More]

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community. Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page. If PowerShell isn’t your thing that’s OK. There are plenty of other topics to choose from. [Read More]

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community (or Microsoft Data Platform community. Although it’s called T-SQL Tuesday, it’s not limited to SQL Server database engine only). It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic blog | twitter. This month’s tsql2sday is being hosted by James Anderson blog |twitter and this month’s theme is “Shipping Database Changes”. For this T-SQL Tuesday, I’d like to hear about your thoughts or experiences with database deployments. [Read More]