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 in
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 backup
Here's a problem I see on almost every data project: the SSIS package has the server name hardcoded. Or the credentials are baked into the connection manager. Or the file paths are literals inside the data flow. Everything works fine in development. Then it goes to production and
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'
If you've spent any time in a modern software team, you've heard about unit testing. The Java developers have JUnit. The .NET developers have NUnit and MSTest. Ruby has RSpec. Python has unittest. Meanwhile, SQL Server developers have been sitting on the sidelines of the automated
If you're still on SQL Server 2008 or earlier, you know the dance. You want to compare a row to its neighbor — the previous sale amount, the prior period's balance, the date of the last event — and you end up writing a self-join or a correlated
The MapReduce job ran clean. No exceptions, no FAILED state in the JobTracker, just a green SUCCESS and 847 output records written to HDFS. The business saw the number Monday morning. It was wrong by 12%. Nobody caught it for eleven days. That's the failure mode that doesn&
microsoft sql
I'm the Doctor One of the services we're trying to flesh out a bit more over at Hive Mind is our standard health check and resolution script. Every DBA has his
personal
I'm sure you've noticed by now my job posting blogs have taken over. They were supposed to fill in on Tuesdays and Thursdays while I was supposed to continue
career development
Here are the latest jobs sent in. If you're interested in any of these jobs, let me know! There's an application on each job page.Senior Business Analyst in
career development
Here are the latest jobs sent in. If you're interested in any of these jobs, let me know! There's an application on each job page.Software Engineer Populus