Dear SQL DBA

You'd love to have a job tuning SQL Servers, but you don't have an environment to practice in. Here's how to teach yourself performance tuning and prepare yourself to land and succeed in job interviews.

You need to change an INT column to a BIGINT in a large table. Learn why this schema change can make your transaction log explode, and how to avoid it.

Your boss wants you to automate patching for your SQL Servers. Is that a good idea? How far should you take it? Find out a DBAs perspective.  

Learn what can cause performance regressions after migrating to a new SQL Server version, and how to troubleshoot it.

Learn how to configure the Max Degree of Parallelism and Cost Threshold for Parallelism settings in SQL Server - and about how SQL Server 2014 SP2 and SQL Server 2016 change the way that SQL Server automatically configures some SQL Servers with lots of cores.

You're a Junior or mid-level Database Administrator with no obvious career path. How do you grow the right skills to level up your DBA career?

SQL Server’s “index usage stats” dynamic management view is incredibly useful-- but does it tell you what you THINK it tells you? Kendra explains the quirks of how sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats works, as well as why she thinks the information is so valuable.

You’re setting up SQL Server log shipping for disaster recovery. What else do you need to do to best prepare for a failure?

You believe that your expensive SAN is slowing down the SQL Server. How can you make your case without making enemies?

What do you do when your fellow DBA is a ticking time-bomb of bad decisions, waiting to explode your production environment?