As a SQL Server DBA, you may be working in environment that is monitored by System Center Operations Manager. If so, you’ll probably spend a lot of time in building a monitoring platform and configuring it to ensure that the DBA team get woken up when things start (or about to start) going wrong.

Working with 30000 data files in one database – why do my log backups take so long?

This is a quick post about measuring query performance. How do you know that changes you’ve made to improve a query are actually beneficial? If all you’re doing is sitting there with a stop watch or watching the timer in the bottom right corner of SQL Server Management Studio then you’re doing it..

Welcome to part three of the PDW Shallow dive. In this section I am going to explore partitioning in PDW. We will look at how to partition a table on the appliance and how to use partition switching. Unfortunately I was hoping to look at the CTAS function and specifically the mega merge statement..

Analysing Index Usage

The first step I use in order to troubleshoot cube processing performance issues is index usage.

I was doing some database tuning recently and I found a missing index that I wanted to add. This is a reasonably straightforward thing to want to do, so I scripted it up and executed the command and went to grab a coffee.

I was working on a data warehousing project recently where I was working with VERY large data sets. It was a customer insight warehouse and as part of that warehouse details about customers were stored including their DOB.

Welcome to part two of my shallow dive into the PDW. In this section we take a look at the options available for ETL with the appliance. Here we will cover the following topics:

There is a very little amount of resource on the internet for PDW. I wanted to do a short series that will focus on the basics of PDW. I am not going into deep detail on the parallel engine or the commercial aspects, but instead am wanting to focus on what PDW is, where it sits in the Microsoft BI..