Parsing file names from paths using T-SQL

January 17, 2018 Andy 15

SQL Server is great at a lot of things. I spend a lot of time blogging about all the cool things that SQL Server does. But (you knew there was a “but”, didn’t you) SQL Server isn’t great at everything. Lets write about something that … [Read More]

Finding active transactions

January 2, 2018 Andy 2

Have you ever forgot to commit a transaction? Maybe you’ve even left for lunch and caused a problem while you were gone. Uncommitted transactions can cause all sorts of problems–not just blocking, but it can affect your Availability Groups & Mirroring, your TempDB version store … [Read More]

Backing up to NUL:

December 31, 2017 Andy 0

Linux folks have lots of jokes & fun t-shirts about /dev/null/. The null device is a handy location to dump output to, when you don’t actually care about the output. In PowerShell, you can use Out-Null to dump extra output into the ether, and keep … [Read More]

Interviewed by Mohammad Darab

December 20, 2017 Andy 0

As part of Mohammad’s series of interviews, he interviewed me on my thoughts on the future of SQL Server, the DBA role, and the cloud. Read the interview on Mohammad’s site.

Alerting on SQL Server Blocking

December 18, 2017 Andy 20

Identifying blocking is one of the most basic things that a DBA should be monitoring for. I previously wrote about how to identify blocking in SQL Server and find the leading blocker. Recently, my friend Jim Donahoe (blog | twitter) asked me about setting up … [Read More]

Q&A with the MVP Award Program

November 1, 2017 Andy 0

I was recently interviewed by the Microsoft MVP Award Program about organizing the LGBT meetup at PASS Summit last year, and about running diverse, inclusive tech events here in Boston. We discuss why it’s important to have LGBT events, and other events that focus on … [Read More]

Ten tips for PASS Summit Attendees

October 29, 2017 Andy 0

I won’t be at PASS Summit this year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give advice to those who will be there. I got an email asking for advice for Summit First-Timers, and after sending over the list of tips, I figured I’d write a … [Read More]

Finding the Leader Blocker

October 26, 2017 Andy 12

During the course of normal processing in a database, blocking happens. Blocking is “by design” because your database is on ACID. In an OLTP database, most of your transactions are short in duration, so we expect blocking to also be short in duration. If blocking … [Read More]