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Security with Auditability.
IF you are a DBA in any of the following: A publicly-traded company A company that has to comply with HIPAA or PCI A company with DBA that hate disorder …then you need to have an audit-friendly method...
View ArticleHow SQL AD Group Security promotes Clean DBA Living.
We know that we can improve auditability and simply database security administration by doignt he following: Eliminate SQL Server authentication in favor of integrated security; and Create AD Groups,...
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Latch Waits. What they mean, and when are they bad?
Recently our shop migrated to the new Version 11 of Dell’s Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise, our monitoring tool. Immediately we began seeing alerts that read like this: The latch wait time rate is...
View ArticleSQL Terms of Art — Pronouncing them correctly
There is English. There is also geek-speak. Then there is DBA-Speak. Then, for the truly advanced among us, there is SQL Server DBA-speak. However, if we are to sound like professional DBAs and not...
View ArticleThe Proper use of File Groups and Files
If you are creating a database, and it is going to be large, you may want to consider having more file groups than just PRIMARY. File groups enable the DBA to segregate objects into separate files. For...
View ArticleDBCC CHECKDB in tough and easy situations.
Every production database should be subject to an integrity check with DBCC CHECKDB. Every week at least. It’s not just a best practice; the failure to do so should be considered dereliction of DBA...
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More Benefits of a Good Monitoring Tool.
The importance of a good monitoring tool cannot be over-emphasized. I’ve posted on this issue before. Now, I’d like to get into a tad more detail about this issue. If you have responsibility for...
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Page Life Expectancy — A Metric on the Wane?
For years, we’ve seen the metric of Page Life Expectancy (PLE) touted as a health barometer for SQL Server. Moreover, we have seen PLE touted as a magic number: “300 seconds (5 minutes) means that...
View ArticleIs a Non-Clustered GUID Primary Key a problem
Recently I received pushback from a developer about the use of a GUID primary key. The proposed database schema, intended to be used with Entity Framework, contained numerous tables primary-keyed on a...
View ArticleThe SQL Server Helpfulness Hall of Fame
There are a gigantic number of tools out there that are free and extremely helpful. Since I’ve been away for a while with other issues (prepping a presentation for SQL Pass – hope it’s accepted; new...
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