Consultant & Trainer for all things MSSQL
There are a number of dials and knobs in SQL Server that allow the DBA to fine tune almost every aspect of the server. In this post I highlight five quick wins that every DBA can enable on their server to improve performance. The best part is they will take all of three seconds of…
Recently I had to purchase an additional external hard disk to back up my data. While creating a system image of the laptop I noticed that it was taking far too long. On further inspect I found out the transfer rate was far lower than promised. This post will explain how to identify and fix…
Is it better to take a hit on performance due to Fill Factor or Page Splits? That is the question being answered in this video. As with most things in SQL Server there is a trade-off. Is the impact of additional pages caused by a fill factor of 70% more damaging than the impact of…
Recently I came across a video in which it was suggested the Page Splits/sec counter was not useful in identifying Page splits and that using fill factor to reduce the number of page splits doesn’t really fix the issues and often makes things worse. Naturally this goes contrary to a number of practices DBAs have…
During the lockdown I started rereading Stephen Fry’s Mythos. A modern interpretation of the Greek myths with the trademark Fry Humor. Greek mythology like most ancient literature is dotted with characters related to each other in a number of ways and presented a great opportunity to create a Graph database of the different characters and…
In this post I have provided the link and script for the video demonstrating how Partitioning improves performance. Video on how to use the script The Script
Ever wondered if your server is being targeted for a brute force attack? What does it look like? How to prevent it? What is a brute force attack? A brute force attack is different from other attacks because it’s relying purely on a numbers game to gain access to the system. Unlike social engineering attacks…
A common issue with the ELT process is that you find out errors after they have been loaded. This is usually not any issue unless the database specifically doesn’t have an option to help identify the error specifically. An example of this is the relief expressed by developers when Microsoft announces the release of the…
In this post we explore the way to navigates between pages in PowerBI. The latest release of PowerBI has made this process very simply and most developers will find it useful to convert the old bookmarks into Action events. This will not only reduce the number of steps but also improve usability. Adding a button…
WordPress uses MySQL as its database back end and as a result it is important to upgrade and patch MySQL database versions when possible. This is especially true for older versions of MySQL which get installed by default with older WordPress Installers like those found on Web Platform Installer. Before proceeding with any such changes…
WordPress is a one of the most commonly used technologies to host a website and blog. WordPress in turn uses PHP to render the content and therefore it is critical to make sure the version of PHP being used is the latest one. Like most software they release fixes and performance improvements with every release….
In this post we cover how to use the Relative Time Filter in PowerBI desktop. A great features to have when reporting the relative Time Filter Option allows the developer to show only a certain set of date that is constrained relative to the current time. For example show only data from the last 24…
Automated page refresh is a feature that allows the developer to display real time information on the power Bi report. This is not to be confused with features like incremental refresh which only loads a subset of data from very large tables. Automated page refresh supports two mode Scheduled and Change Detection (Premium only) In…
This feature has been requested a number of times and it’s great to be able to see it being implemented in PowerBI finally. This feature is currently in preview. In order to enable preview features please review the link at the bottom of this post. Once the changes have been made you will need to…
PowerBI is one of the products where Microsoft aggressively releases features every month. The effort is paying off as it’s quickly become the industry standard for reporting. The most attractive aspect for most companies is the comparable visualizations at a very attractive price point. In this series of posts we cover the new features released…