I learned to do Change Management from some really smart people. When I first became a DBA, I worked at a small software company where changes were released with increasing frequency over the years. Our team was really great at planning and deploying changes, because we constantly worked at improving.
SQL Server 2016’s Query Store feature promises to be better than Plan Guides ever were. The Query Store lets you track query performance, collect execution plans, and force a specific plan if you notice that a query is sometimes fast, and sometimes slow.
When you need to measure how long a query takes and how many resources it uses, STATISTICS TIME and STATISTICS IO are great tools for interactive testing in SQL Server. I use these settings constantly when tuning indexes and query.
@SQLSista asked a fun question on Twitter recently about how to figure out the partitioning key on an existing table:
Bad Partitioned HEAP predates me. No clustered index, Primary Key on ID column and multiple datetime columns. How to find the partitioning key? #sqlhelp
Trainers and speakers need the code they write to be predictable, re-runnable, and as fast as possible. Faking writes can be useful for speakers and teachers who want to be able to generate some statistics in SQL Server’s index dynamic management views or get some query execution plans into cache. The “faking” bit makes the code re-runnable, and usually a bit faster. For writes, it also reduces the risk of filling up your transaction log.
Hindsight is everything. I was lucky to be trained by a great team of DBAs back when I first started with SQL Server. But it’s hard to know exactly what you really need to know, particularly as new tools are becoming available.
Sometimes we learn things in the wrong order. Or skip a step. If you’re just starting out as a SQL Server DBA, here are three questions that you need to be able to answer at any given time. If you aren’t 100% sure that you can handle these questions at 3 AM when you’ve had a few drinks, it’s time to revisit them.
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