The dev cluster said the job worked. The UAT cluster said the job worked. Then we deployed to production and the job failed in under four minutes with a ClassNotFoundException that had never appeared in either environment. What was different? On dev, the team had manually installed a newer version
Certification
I passed the exam! Woo hoo! It feels great to have passed this milestone. I want to finish up this series so I can help you pass too! I will say there are some
Certification
January 31 is coming up pretty fast ,Just 3 more days, so I want to try to knock out the rest of the study guide in the next couple days so that I'm ready
Certification
January 31st is the day I've set to take the 70-457: Transition Your MCTS on SQL Server 2008 to MCSA: SQL Server 2012, Part 1. So let's jump right in to the
One of my resume items from this period is "Designed and Implemented High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plans for SQL Server." In the Azure IaaS context, this meant SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups running across Azure Availability Sets. It sounds straightforward until you start working through the Azure-
career development
I'm back baby! I've been away from the blog far too long! I logged back in after four months and found comments waiting, updates to perform and a host of other
Most developers learn unit testing as a retrofit: they have existing code, they write tests for it, and if they're diligent they maintain both going forward. Test-driven development flips that. You write the test first. The test fails because the code doesn't exist yet. Then
Every data team I've worked with has a folder somewhere — usually called something like "Utilities" or "Scripts" or "Misc" — full of .sql files with names like fix_customer_ids_2011.sql and reprocess_orders_march.sql and TEMP_DO_NOT_DELETE.sql.
SQL Server performance on Azure VMs in 2012 could be excellent or it could be terrible, and the single biggest variable wasn't CPU or memory — it was storage. Microsoft introduced Premium Storage (SSD-backed) in late 2012, and understanding the difference between Standard and Premium, plus the gotchas
Last time I introduced tSQLt and showed a simple function test. Functions are the easy case — they take inputs and return outputs, no side effects. But most of the logic worth testing in SQL Server lives in stored procedures that read from and write to real tables. That's
The second time I set up an Azure VM for SQL Server, I found myself doing the same 45-minute configuration dance I'd done the first time: attach data disks, format with the right allocation unit size, move database files, set MAXDOP, configure max server memory, set up
Spinning up your first Azure VM feels almost anticlimactic. You pick an image, choose a size, click through the wizard, wait ten minutes, and there's a SQL Server instance accessible from SSMS. Same engine, same T-SQL, same management tools. It's easy to conclude that you&