SQL Sentry Countdown to SQLCruise Contest (Day 2)
It’s three days until SQLCruise Alaska. That means that a bunch of database geeks are getting ready to fly to Seattle and hop on a boat. This is, by all accounts, a fantastic event where we all get to a chance learn and teach.
This year, SQL Sentry is helping us count down to SQLCruise. Here’s our schedule:
- C-4: Wednesday
- C-3: Thursday (today)
- C-2: Friday
- C-1: SQLBBQ in Seattle
- C-0: Departure Day (Sunday)
Yesterday’s Winners
Yesterday we asked you how to find the highest-CPU-consuming parts of an execution plan. Some of you just said “estimated CPU cost,” but that’s not enough – we wanted you to explain how to find the highest CPU consumers, because that’s where the process starts to suck. We randomly drew three correct answers this morning:
- “Mouse-over elements of the Execution Plan and look for the Estimated CPU Cost.” Matthew Clyman – wins the Mandarin Chinese version of our book
- “Load the plan into SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. Select the Top Operations tab and sort by CPU cost.” – Mark Johnson – wins Performance Tuning with DMVs
- “I throw the Query into SQL Sentry, F5 it… go to the Top Operations tab, order by Est CPU Cost… then cry(when working from home).” – Rob Sullivan wins Securing SQL Server
Congratulations, guys!
Today’s Contest
In the spirit of learning and teaching, we decided to give everyone a chance to share something that’s helped them. You see, we here at Brent Ozar PLF love learning and we love sharing what we’ve learned over the years. We do that, in part, by sharing great articles we’ve found in our weekly newsletter (sign up here). This contest is your chance to share a favorite article.
To enter, share a link to one of your favorite SQL Server articles (not written by you) in the comments below. We’ll sift through the entries and pick our top 10 favorite articles, then we’ll run them in the June 6th edition of our newsletter attributed to you. The winner is the person who gets the highest number of reader clicks on their favorite article. What do you win, you might ask? One lucky winner will get the contents of this crazy pinata!
ZOMG, It's fulla prizes!
To win, enter a comment on this post with a link to your favorite learning resource and a short blurb about why people should read it.
Fine print – the contest is open to US residents only. (International shipping is painful.) Comments must be received before 6:00AM Eastern Friday morning. Pinata not included. The highest-click winner will be announced in the Brent Ozar PLF newsletter on Monday June 13th.
I really enjoyed the article Brent wrote about goals earlier this year. I always find myself going back to that when I start feeling that I’m going off the tracks.
Goals? Where we’re going, we don’t need goals.
Thanks for that Brent.
Nick
The article that saved my bacon was
http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/Disaster-recovery-101-fixing-metadata-corruption-without-a-backup.aspx
By Paul Randal. I was staring at a corrupt database on a dev server and that article walked me through the steps to piece the database back together.
Definitely this article from Kim back in March about non-clustered indexes:
http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/Indexes_JustBecauseUCan_NO.aspx
“Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should”
I took over a set of databases last year where the indexing strategy seemed to be “Nonclustered index on every field, please”. We also had a couple of indexes we found named (I’m not kidding) [], so this really hit home for me.
I forgot to escape my tags above, but the indexes were named “Name Of Missing Index”.
I fully plan to sneak into the office early one morning, hack someone’s password, print out a crap-load of these on the plotter, and wallpaper the hallway:
Free Poster! Guide to SQL Server Isolation Levels: http://www.littlekendra.com/2011/02/08/isoposter/
And no, I’m not trying to score points with my selection. It’s not a popularity contest. 😛
I really enjoy reading Shuan Stuart’s blog. I go back to this article as a reference when setting up new servers or starting a new job. Great read.
http://shaunjstuart.com/archive/2010/07/hey-check-out-the-new-kid/
His blog is very digestible.
I think one of the best articles I’ve ever read is Erland Sommarskog’s treatise on “The Curse and Blessings of Dynamic SQL.” I highly recommend it for all SQL developers.
http://www.sommarskog.se/dynamic_sql.html
Brad Schulz has written lots of great posts, but this is one of my personal favorites.
“A second in the life of a query operator” starts with an good explanation of how to read a query plan and then takes it to the next level with a long and engrossing “play in one act” which walks you through a journey with SQL Engine, Simon Select and others as a query gets executed.
http://bradsruminations.blogspot.com/2010/11/second-in-life-of-query-operator.html
By far, this one is my fave. It’s the one that turn my career around. Brent, you played a huge part.
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/04/rock-stars-normal-people-and-you/
And no, I am not trying to score the point either 🙂
Keep going back to this as I find more servers that haven’t been managed or come into our support…. http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Audit_a_SQL_Server_Configuration
I’ve read so many great posts over the past few months, but if I had to pick one, I’d go with Tom LaRock’s “Four Little Words”:
http://thomaslarock.com/2009/12/those-four-little-words/
Really makes a case for the simple + specific.