Monthly Archives: August 2010

Interview with SQL Server MVP Glenn Berry

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This is a first of a series of interviews with speakers presenting at the SQLServerCentral.com track at SQL Server Connections in November 2010. This interview is with SQL Server MVP Glenn Berry (blog | Twitter).

 

Glenn Berry

Tell us a little about yourself Glenn.

After high school, I spent four years in the Marine Corps, serving in the Infantry and in Armor. I got out as a Sergeant and went to college. I have a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in International Affairs. I initially wanted to be an intelligence analyst similar to Jack Ryan’s character in the Tom Clancy books. I spent a few years as a developer before I grew up and discovered that I liked being a DBA much better. I have been a Database Architect at NewsGator for about four and half years.

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SQL Server Monitoring Checklist

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It’s been awhile since I have worked on my checklist series of blog posts that will eventually be turned into a book. This time around the checklist focuses on the kinds of things you might want to monitor on your SQL Server instance to ensure that they are working as you expect.

Unlike some of my previous checklists, this one is different in the fact that the checklist is asking if you are monitoring a particular aspect of a SQL Server instance, and if you are, how you are performing the monitoring, and how often are you performing the monitoring. My goal is not to suggest what you should monitor, how you should monitor, or how often you should monitor, but only to get started thinking about what kinds of things you should be monitoring on a periodic basis. Towards the end of the list I have provided a list of some of the more common ways you might consider monitoring different aspects of your SQL Server instances.

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DBA Tracy Hamlin Wins the 2010 Exceptional DBA of the Year Award

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Tracy Hamlin Tracy Hamlin (Twitter) has been voted as the 2010 Exceptional DBA of the Year by the SQL Server community. The annual awards program, hosted by SQL Server Central and sponsored by Red Gate Software, drew the largest number of community votes in its three-year history.

Tracy receives a trophy, full conference registration for the PASS Community Summit 2010 in Seattle, four nights’ accommodations, and $300 in travel expenses. Along with this year’s other finalists – John Burnette of Fidelity Information Services, Jonathan Kehayias of Tampa General Hospital, Ted Krueger of Pharmedium Services, Kevan Riley of Destinology, and Jorge Segarra of University Community Hospital – she receives a copy of Red Gate’s SQL Toolbelt.

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Checkout SQLServerIO.com for Useful Information on SQL Server Storage Systems

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At the recent SQLSaturday #28 in Baton Rouge, LA, I had the opportunity to meet Wes Brown (Blog | Twitter), and attend his session on “Understanding Storage Systems and SQL Server”. I enjoyed his presentation and also discovered that Wes has a blog where he shares his deep knowledge of SQL Server I/O. If you are interested in learning more about SQL Server I/O, his blog offers useful posts, presentations, and some software tools he has written for himself. For example, he has a Disk Drive RAID Configuration Tool that you can use to help give you an idea of RAID performance based on drive characteristics and other factors.

How Do You Defragment Your SQL Server Indexes

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I give a lot of presentations based on best practices, and in all of them I stress the importance of regularly rebuilding or reorganizing indexes. Both the REBUILD and the REORGANIZE options have their pros and cons, so I thought it would be interesting to do a poll to see which method(s) was preferred by DBAs. The results are to the left.

After seeing the results of the poll (which was not scientifically designed), I was rather impressed with how many DBAs use a combination of both the REBUILD and the REORGNIZE methods to defragment their indexes. To me, this indicates a high level of knowledge of how to best defragment indexes, as using a combination of both options allows the DBA to choose which method is best for a particular index, rather than taking the brute force method of using either REBUILD or REORANIZE to defragment all of their indexes.  I was also impressed that only a very small percentage of the poll’s respondents didn’t defragment their indexes, or know what index defragmentation was.

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Don’t Forget to Sign Up for the 24 Hours of PASS: Summit Preview

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Looking for some free SQL Server training? How about 24 hours of free training offered by some of the top SQL Server experts in the world? If so, sign up for the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS live webcasts to be held September 15-16, 2010. It’s your opportunity to continue and broaden your SQL Server education, with your only investment being your time.

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