Blog

  • Attending a climate protest for the first time

    This is a blog devoted to databases, but for once I’m going to go off topic and talk about something I did at the weekend that I’ve never done before. On Easter Sunday I went to London to join in a protest demanding action on climate change. I’d heard about what Extinction Rebellion were doing Read more

  • MAXDOP, Parallelism and the Cloud

    Parallelism and MAXDOP The pros and cons of parallelism have always been with us in SQL Server and I blogged about this a couple of years ago. This is an updated version of that post to include details of the new wait stat related to parallelism that was added in 2017 (CXCONSUMER), as well as Read more

  • Finding “Orphaned” database files – script

    When you drop a database from a SQL Server instance the underlying files are usually removed. This doesn’t happen however if you set the database to be offline first, or if you detach the database rather than dropping it. The scenario with offline databases is the one that occurs most often in practice. I might Read more

  • Checking Progress of the Creation of your Azure Resources

    When I’ve created resources in Azure it’s usually taken from a few minutes and up to quarter of an hour – though sometimes longer. When you’re new to this stuff, you can be uncertain and wonder, “Is it really creating it?”, “Did I hit the right buttons?”. As a result it can be handy to Read more

  • Using the Sequence Object to Generate Reference Numbers

    The SEQUENCE object was added to T-SQL in SQL Server 2012. It’s reasonably well known to DBAs, but less so to developers or those new to SQL, so I thought I’d produce a quick post to demonstrate its use. In basic terms, a SEQUENCE is a way of generating a sequence of numerical values. The Read more

  • There’s got to be a better way

    For T-SQL Tuesday #111, Andy Leonard asks “What is your why? Why do you do what you do?” Like Andy, I didn’t take a straight route into being a DBA. I actually trained as a teacher, and did a variety of temp jobs – largely in call centres – before I got my first “proper” Read more