Posts from 2015-10-29

Posted by Aviv Madmon on Monday, 20 May 2013

The acquisition will expand the acquiring company's solutions for the applicative environment of MS SQL. DBSophic, has developed an innovative solution for SQL server's workload tuning. Customers include Siemens, Nestle, BMW, and the US air force.

The developer of the EZManage SQL software, DBA Services, announced the acquisition of DBSophic. The company notes that the acquisition will expand its solutions on the applicative environment of Microsoft SQL.

Posted by Ami Levin on Tuesday, 11 December 2012

T-SQL Tuesday is now entering its fourth year! Sebastian Meine, who's hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday, chose joins as this month's subject, to correspond with his "A join a day" blog series.

Posted by Ami Levin on Tuesday, 31 July 2012

"If you walk into a room full of DBAs or DB developers and you feel like having the same kind of fun as setting fire to a dry hayfield, just ask this question: “What’s a better design, using natural keys or artificial keys?” Satisfaction guaranteed.

When I started to study database design, this was one of the first hot controversies I encountered. If you Google the phrase “natural vs. artificial keys,” you’ll come up with more than 150 million results, including endless debates, numerous articles, blog posts with passionate replies, long theoretical and practical arguments, and even the occasional profanity."

Posted by Ami Levin on Sunday, 15 July 2012

Just two months ago, we launched the beta version of Qure Analyzer V1.5. We would like to thank the hundreds of users who took part in the beta plan, used the beta version, reported bugs and provided valuable feedback. Today, I'm proud to announce the GA release of Qure Analyzer V1.5. You can download your copy here.

Posted by Ami Levin on Wednesday, 30 May 2012

Today I want to share with you a true story that happened to me last week. Although a bit off-topic, you might find it 'amusing', useful and a real time saver in case you ever need to do the same thing.

When I bought my desktop PC last year, I purchased an SSD drive to be used as the system drive (C:\). At the time, the prices of SSD devices was pretty steep so although I had some doubts, I convinced myself that a 40GB drive should be more than enough to accommodate everything I need. Big mistake #1. As it turned out, only the I-tunes backups of my iPhone which (for some reason) can be placed only on C:\ took 16GB... Add to that my SQL Server installation, office and other essentials. Most of these applications, even when installed to a different drive, still place a lot of stuff on the system drive so soon I found myself struggling for space and using every trick in the book to free up as much space as possible on C:\ just to be able to work.

Posted by Ami Levin on Sunday, 20 May 2012

I've recently encountered some confusion regarding one of the new components of SQL Server 2012, the SQL Server Data Tools AKA SSDT. From the questions in the MSDN SQL Server forum which I moderate, I realized that the distinction between SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and SSDT is not clear enough to many. I have to agree that Microsoft did leave some space for confusion and a lot of duplicate functionality in both tools so let's try to clear up a bit of this confusion.

 Posted by Ami Levin on Tuesday, 15 May 2012

About a year ago, we launched Qure Analyzer V1.0 (previously called Qure Workload Analyzer). Since then, we had thousands of downloads and received a lot of great feedback from the community. We did not rest... Your feedback and bug reports kept us busy improving, fixing and enhancing Qure Analyzer to keep its position as the best workload analysis tool available for SQL Server.

Posted by Ami Levin on Tuesday, 08 May 2012

Yesterday, at our 118th Israeli SQL Server User Group Meeting, Adi Cohn delivered a session on common performance pitfalls. One of the issues he mentioned is something every DBA and database designer should be aware of. Many applications use overly large size limit for their variable data types. The reasoning in many cases is simply "Why not?" If you have a variable size column and you made the choice to use one of the VAR data types anyway, why limit the size? Even if you expect to have up to 300 characters in the 'comments' column for example, what is wrong with defining it as 3,000? it's just metadata, right? Wrong...

 Posted by Ami Levin on Wednesday, 25 April 2012

An interesting discussion came up lately on the MVP private forums regarding index rebuilds,recompilation and statistics updates. Although the debate spanned too many aspects for me to cover here in this short post, I think that one important point should be emphasized as it might be making you do redundant work or even worse - unknowingly degrade the performance of your workload.

Posted by Ami Levin on Tuesday, 10 April 2012

SQL Server 2012 brings with it so many new features and enhancements that it is futile to try and sum it up. Many articles and blog posts have been and will be written on the shiny new HA/DR, T-SQL, Columnstore and batch processing and numerous others. In this short post, I want to draw your attention to some less ‘shiny’ work that will affect your first interaction with SQL Server 2012 – the installation process.