I’ve been conducting quite a few SQL Server health assessments lately so I thought I would write a brief explanation of the importance of “Instant File Initialization” and how I check to see if it’s being used. SQL Server File Initialization The SQL Server storage engine utilizes an initialization process on data and log files. [...]

SQL Server supports numerous commands, most of which are extremely well documented with detailed examples provided in “Books on Line.” However, there are quite a few that were left out of the official documentation and remain unsupported by Microsoft. You’ll find references regarding these in blogs across the Internet and some are more useful than [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve been hearing a lot about Master Data Management lately.  Master Data Management is not an entirely new theory; it goes back to the Master File idea from the days of the mainframe.  The basic concept is to have a single ‘correct’ set of data that the entire company will use. [...]

The very thought of database corruption makes my skin crawl. Unfortunately, it’s something that all Database Administrators will eventually experience and need to correct. I’m not going to discuss how to recover from this lurking problem. Instead, I’m going to give you some simple strategies to ensure you are aware of the issue as soon [...]

This post is for those of you who need a quick answer to this issue and you’ve already restarted the DTC service and the SQL Server service in that order. Before you start pulling your hair out and running to DTCPing or DTCTest, if it’s ok with all parties involved, try restarting the DTC service [...]

For any SQL Server DBA who has been in the game longer than the advent of SQL Server 2005, there was one standard place to turn when you wanted to tune your database.  You would turn to the profiler!  If you had some experience with this, and had been burned by getting too small of [...]

The Perils of the IT Profession One of the common challenges that all technicians face, no matter what area of IT they work in, is the absolute attention to detail our profession demands. Switch a couple of characters in a script, forget to set your SID, set the wrong flag at the wrong time and [...]

We have learned in previous blogs that identifying what our customers expect from us is an absolute requirement in meeting their needs.   We probably won’t be meeting all of our customer’s expectations if we don’t have a firm understanding of what they are. We also know that each organization, group and individual user has their own [...]

In this post, we will continue our discussion on effective communication skills and the role they play in our careers. This two-part blog entry is a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate [...]

As we all know, effective verbal and written communication is critical to the success of any business activity.   The more complex the activity or the more coordination that is required to complete a given task, the more important effective communications becomes.    There are very few tasks in the DBA profession that don’t require some level of coordination between [...]