I was recently extremely honored to find out that I earned the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) certification for SQL Server 2008. For me, this is a major milestone in a long, difficult, and costly journey. I have received several questions about it already, and while I can't answer everything, I am happy share as much …

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It's once again the second Tuesday of the month, meaning it's T-SQL Tuesday! This month's topic comes to us from Jen McCown (blog | @JenniferMcCown). Jen is asking us to share our knowledge about filegroups, and it just so happens that I have a story about migrating to new storage that involved a large number of file …

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I'm fortunate to be able to work with some rather large SQL Server instances on a daily basis, including databases over 25TB in size. Due to their bulk, "VLDBs" (Very Large Databases) present some challenges for DBAs: following best practices for small transactional systems might not be feasible on a VLDB. …

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At work, a key function of my team is importing new systems into our data warehouse, most of which come from vendors. To do this we utilize many different methods depending on the capabilities of the source system and desired timeliness of the data. ETL through SSIS, snapshot replication, and transactional replication …

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Back at the first Chicago Free-Con event in 2011, Brent Ozar was talking about how wonderful the SQL Saturday movement is and prophesized that in the near future we'll be seeing similar free training events put on by individual vendors instead of community volunteers. Eighteen months later I found myself at Red Gate's …

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This year, time seems to be flying by faster than ever. It's October already, and we're up to our 35th installment of T-SQL Tuesday. This time we're hosted by Nick Haslam (blog | @nhaslam). Nick's asking "what is your most horrifying discovery from your work with SQL Server?" The story that scares me the most …

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More often than not, I’ll expand the “Tables” folder in SQL Server Management Studio and browse the list to find whatever table or index I’m looking for. This works well in many situations, but when your database has over 20,000 tables, the results can be overwhelming! As your databases get larger and more complex, you …

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Many articles on database backups reference running database backups and maintenance processes overnight. In lots of situations this is a great idea, especially if you’re dealing with a transactional system that has users connecting to the database during the day and minimal activity outside of business hours. But for …

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July 2012 is the thirty-second installation of T-SQL Tuesday – wow that’s a lot! I can still remember reading posts that were part of the first one… This month’s topic comes from Erin Stellato (blog | @erinstellato), the newest employee of SQLskills (congrats Erin!!) She’s asking us to track what we do for a day and …

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Chicago's third annual SQL Saturday will soon be upon us, and as food and beverage coordinator it's my job to obsess over what's on the menu. SQL Saturday food offerings seem to have evolved over time. The first few I attended offered pizza, which is of course a great way to feed a large number of people. While very …

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