Monthly Archives: February 2011

SQLskills SQL Server Immersion Training: A Retrospective

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Last week I attended the inaugural training event of the new four-week SQL Server Immersion Training offered by Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randall of SQLskills.com. The four available training weeks include:

  • Internals and Performance
  • Performance Tuning
  • High Availability and Disaster Recovery
  • Security, PowerShell, and Development Support

I attended the Internals and Performance class in Dallas, and I will also attend the Performance Tuning class in March, also held in Dallas. While these classes can be used to help you prepare for the MCM, they are designed to be taken by any DBA who wants to deepen their understanding of SQL Server. In fact, only a handful of the 29 attendees at the Internals and Performance tuning class were interested in pursuing the MCM. Most of them, like me, just wanted to gain a deeper level of understanding of SQL Server.

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Introducing Kalen Delaney’s SQL Server Stairways Tutorial Series

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In case you haven’t noticed, there is a new link on SQLServerCentral.com for a new series of tutorial articles called Kalen Delaney’s SQL Server Stairways. This series, edited by Kalen Delaney, brings together a large number of top SQL Server writers to introduce a wide variety of SQL Server topics. Some of the current Stairway Tutorials include:

  • Stairway to Database Design by Joe Celko
  • Stairway to Integration Services by Andy Leonard
  • Stairway to MDX by Bill Pearson
  • Stairway to Server-Side Tracing by Dan Guzman
  • Stairway to SQL Server Agent by Richard Waymire
  • Stairway to SQL Server Indexes by David Durant
  • Stairway to SQL Server Replication by Sebastian Meine
  • Stairway to SQL Server Reporting Services by Jessica Moss
  • Stairway to StreamInsight by Johan Ahlen

Each Stairway Tutorial is a series of articles that help you build the necessary skills you need to be an exceptional DBA. This is an on-going project, and expect to see additional Stairway Tutorials in the near future.

Poll Reveals DBAs Actively Tune TEMPDB

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When I manage a SQL Server instance, I always make an extra effort to optimize the performance of TEMPDB, so I decided to do a poll to see if other DBAs did the same.

When the results came in, I was a little surprised, as about 91% of those who responded to the poll said that they do take steps to optimize TEMPDB. When you look at the results, you can see that about 9% of the respondents said that they did not take any action to boost the performance of TEMPDB.

The remaining 91% of the respondents had the option to select one or more TEMPDB tuning options. Of the options they selected, three of the options were very close in the number of responses (the top three in the graph), with only the use of solid state storage coming in last. Because the top three options are so close, I am guessing that most of the people who responded to the poll probably perform all three, which is something that I do myself.

Of course, there are many other things you can do to help optimize TEMPDB, the ones listed here are only the tip of the iceberg. If you are one of those DBAs who still haven’t taken any action to optimize TEMPDB on your SQL Servers, you might want to download my presentation (a PDF file) on “How to Optimize TEMPDB Performance”.