Database

How to Recover the Master Database in SQL Server 2012

01/14/14 In my seven years as a production DBA, I can count on one hand the number of times I have need to restore the master database as a result of a disaster. In other words, th…

Connect to Windows Azure Virtual Machine Using SSMS

12/18/13 In 2013, Microsoft made it available for customers to utilize virtual machines running in Windows Azure. This allowed customers to run an on-premises version of SQL Server…

Multitick: multiple-subscriber time.Ticker in Go

12/17/13 Many of our agent programs have several independent worker routines that all need to be timed on clock ticks, sometimes with a specific time offset. We recently open-sourc…

Analysis of PayPal’s Node-vs-Java benchmarks

12/09/13 I was interested in the data shown in PayPal’s blog post on switching from Java to Node.js, for two reasons. First, at a glance both sets of benchmark data looked very cle…

Changing Default Database File Locations in SQL Server

12/06/13 When you create a database in SQL Server and do not specify a file location for your data and log files, SQL Server will rely on the default locations as defined in the se…

How to write Go packages coders will love

12/03/13 This post was featured in our July 2015 anthology of most popular SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) blog posts of all time. One of the patterns I’ve found in t…

5 Things You Didn’t Know About SQL Agent

11/27/13 Microsoft SQL Server comes with a boatload of additional components. One component is the SQL Agent. The purpose of the SQL Agent is to serve as a job scheduler. Many expe…

What Happens if I Shrink a Database in Windows Azure?

11/20/13 At some point in your career as a data professional, you are going to fill up an entire drive with data. It is not a question of “if,” but a matter of “when” this will hap…

Providing Exceptional Customer Service to Exceptional Customers

11/05/13 What is “exceptional” customer service? It’s difficult to define, but you know when you have received it. It is an experience in which a service representative helped chan…

Big-O Notation Made Simple

10/23/13 If you’re a programmer or computer scientist, you’re probably familiar with Big-O notation. It’s part of your foundational understanding of how complex a problem and/or al…

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 3)

10/03/13 You can use the information in the SQL Server plan cache to research performance issues and investigate opportunities for performance improvement. In this three-part artic…

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 2)

10/03/13 In this second part of a three-part article series, we’ll look at how to examine the plan cache to quickly identify plans that need tuning, including: Plans that have miss…