Show 19 – Thomas LaRock

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Show 19 was recorded at the SQLBits conference in London, where we had the pleasure to interview PASS President, Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter).

We talk to Tom about his long time volunteering at PASS and about his current role as the president of the organization.

Among other topics, we cover:

  • What does it mean to be PASS president?
  • What’s the path to being on the board of directors?
  • How does Tom manage to balance between his job at Solarwinds, his role at PASS and his family?
  • How did 24 Hours of PASS come to the world?
  • What is PASS Summer Camp?
  • And more..

About Tom:

Tom LaRock works as a Head Geek for Solarwinds, where his mission is to give IT and Data Professionals longer weekends.

He also serves as the president of the PASS board of directors.

He’s a Microsoft Certified Master, a SQL Server MVP, a VMWare vExpert, and also a Microsoft Certified Trainer. He has over 15 years experience in the IT industry in various roles such as programmer, developer, analyst, and database administration.

Tom is also the author of DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA and have participated in the technical review of several other books.

Thomas LaRock

Show 18 – Sean McCown

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On show 18, we host Sean McCown, a.k.a Midnight DBA.

We start the show with some tips about working from home without hurting your productivity.

We then take a deep dive into two of Sean’s favorite topics: Reindexing and backup performance.

Sean shares quite a few tips regarding the two topics, and takes us into the bits and bytes of his new free maintenance solution, Minion Reindex.

About Sean:

Sean McCown is a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server 2008. He is also a SQL Server MVP with over 20 years experience in databases. Sean is also founder and co-owner of the renowned website MidnightDBA.com where he records free SQL Server training videos and co-hosts the popular webshow, DBAs@Midnight.

SeanHead

Items mentioned in the show:

Show 17 – It’s Scientific

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On show 17, we start the show with a small small-talk about a few cool researches.

We then dive in to SQL Server and talk about:

  • Backup and DR to Azure
  • Weird lock behavior
  • Isolation Levels Visualization
  • The risk of SQL Server ownership chaining
  • Parallelism, Max Degree of Parallelism and Cost Threshold for Parallelism
  • Azure row level security
  • And more..

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Show 16 – SQL Server Horror Stories

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We love working with SQL Server, but over the years, we’ve had some interesting, funny, sad and horrific cases related to it. On this show, we talk about some of those cases.

Among other topics, we talk about:

  • How to bring SQL Server online when it has no tempdb files
  • Stored Procedure and Plan Cache optimization over the phone
  • Finding out who dropped a database
  • A very destructive MERGE statements that kills clusteres
  • Data corruptions
  • Table variable horrors
  • And more..

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Show 15 – March Madness

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2015 started well, fast, and furious.

We start the show by congratulating Guy for earning the MVP title, and Guy explains what he did in order to get this achievement, and what you can do to earn it too.

We also talk about the crazy March we’re going to have, with a lot of flights, conferences and many other events.

In addition, talk about: 

  • A weird scenario of updating a table using a view
  • How to perform an ordered update efficiently
  • What to expect when transitioning from DBA to consultant
  • Parameterization
  • Productivity and learning optimizations
  • DBA challenges
  • Physical joins
  • And more..

Items mentioned in the show:

Show 13 – SQL Server Monitoring

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On this show, we talk about monitoring in SQL Server. But actually, monitoring is not only monitoring: It’s also baselining, data collection, data analysis, reporting and alerting, and we cover all of those in the show. Among other topics, we talk about:

  • The different levels of monitoring
  • Why it’s important to have a baseline
  • Trend analysis
  • What should you monitor in SQL Server
  • The set of tools for monitoring, baselining, data collection, reporting and alerting
  • What should you do when you get an alert about a certain problem
  • And more..

Items mentioned in the show:

Happy 2015, everybody!

Show 12 – The Other One Mode

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Show 12 is here, and yet again we have a mix of various SQL Server topics. Among them are High Availability, development, performance, Columnstore Indexes, Azure, and general news and events.

More specifically, we talk about:

  • How log backup and Log Shipping really work
  • What parts of SQL Server Memory does the Max Server Memory option controls
  • Performance differences between Row_Number and CROSS APPLY
  • A disturbing bug with the SYSDATETIME function
  • Clustered Columnstore Indexes, and how Rebuild and Reorganize work on them
  • Azure Storage
  • SQLRally and SQLBits conferences
  • And more..

Items mentioned in the show: