Merrill Aldrich

Telecommuting, Month 9

2013-04-22T22:51:00Z

Five Things I’ve Learned About Surviving the Telecommute Over the past several years my wife and I went through this strange series of events where we swapped work roles – first she worked remotely for a Minnesota company, from our home in Seattle, and then we moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota and I started working remotely for my company back in Seattle. Our story is a lot like what you read about remote work, but it’s different to live it. Backstory We lived on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, near Seattle,...(read more)

Speaking in Chicago Saturday

2013-04-11T16:03:36Z

I’m excited to be offering a beginning PowerShell session at SQL Saturday #211 in Chicago on Saturday, April 13. This time we’re making it a family weekend, bringing our two boys. I haven’t been to Chicago for many years, and it’s, of course, an Architecture dream world, so it should be fun to look at some buildings again! Emil Bach House, photo © Jeremy Atherton, 2006 The session is intended to help you get started with some PowerShell syntax basics . I try to demystify the Pipeline a bit, help...(read more)

SSMS 2012 Restore GUI Gotcha

2013-03-15T16:30:07Z

Today I want to bring to your attention an issue in the SQL Server Management Studio 2012 restore GUI. In many ways the new restore dialog is nicer than the old one, with new features and added convenience – but, as is always the Achilles heel of GUI tools like this, if you don’t know what’s really going on it can bite you. I’m not sure what to call this issue, maybe just a UI design flaw. Technically it works as designed, and there’s nothing really wrong with it, so it’s not a bug. But I can imagine...(read more)

T-SQL Tuesday #040: Files, Filegroups and Visualizing Interleaved Objects

2013-03-12T05:08:52Z

Early in my career as a DBA, I have to admit I didn’t quite “get” what all the fuss was about with the multiple file and multiple filegroup capability in SQL Server. Over the years, though, as I learned more about partitioning, backup strategies for large databases and, most importantly, storage internals I’ve started to catch on. For today’s T-SQL Tuesday, I thought I would share an early lesson, using the newly released SQL File Layout Viewer utility available here . Adam Machanic started T-SQL...(read more)

Presenting to East Iowa I-380 U.G. March 12

2013-03-12T03:13:11Z

Tomorrow I’m making the beautiful drive down from Minneapolis into Iowa to present to the I-180 / East Iowa SQL Server Users Group . I’ll be talking about managing lots and lots of unruly databases, and presenting a walkthrough of this maintenance solution . If you’re in the area please come check it out!...(read more)

March Update to Rules-Driven Maintenance

2013-03-12T02:56:00Z

This month I have a minor update to the Rules-Driven Maintenance code I originally posted back in August 2012. This update has just two enhancements, but they are nice ones, I think: Much improved handling for instances that use database snapshots. Ability to do intra-day differential backups purely by setting maintenance times and limits in the policy table. The code posted here is cumulative, and replaces entirely the original code, but please refer back to that original blog post for description,...(read more)

Trigger Authoring Decision Tree

2013-03-06T18:46:09Z

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Public Release, SQL Server File Layout Viewer

2013-03-01T21:36:00Z

Version 1.0 is Now Available! I’ve been working off and on, as my real job permits, on this visualization tool for SQL Server data files. This is an educational or exploratory tool where you can more readily see how the individual data pages in MDF/NDF files are organized, where your tables and indexes live, what effect operations like index rebuild or index reorganize have on the physical layout of the data pages. The viewer will scan a whole database, using only SQL and DBCC commands, and will...(read more)

Presenting for PASSMN User Group Feb. 19

2013-02-11T23:09:31Z

I’m pleased to be presenting the talk “Shoveling Frogs into a Wheelbarrow” for my new hometown user group PASSMN on February 19, 2013. Come on down if you’re in the Twin Cities. This talk is close to my heart, as it shows how I grew from a younger, greener DBA responsible for one or two systems into a terrified overwhelmed more mature DBA facing 2000+ databases alone. I hope this will be a highly interactive session, as I am sure there will be a mix of people in the audience with more or less experience...(read more)

OT Le Casque Zik de Parrot Totally Biased Review (Zik Headphones)

2013-02-02T23:40:36Z

I’m not a complete gadget freak, but sometimes a widget draws me in and pushes that gadget-lust button. Such was the case last year when Philippe Starck and the French bluetooth device maker Parrot announced a collaboration to make what are probably the coolest designer headphones anywhere: http://www.journaldugeek.com/forum/topic/9825-news-un-prix-et-une-date-pour-le-casque-zik-de-parrot/ I never thought I would own a pair, at $400, but my darling, awesome, rock star wife Denise bought me some for...(read more)

Visualizing Data File Layout III

2013-01-29T05:45:50Z

This is part three of a blog series illustrating a method to render the file structure of a SQL Server database into a graphic visualization. Previous Installments: Part 1 Part 2 Those that have been reading this series might be be thinking, “Is he going to go there?” Well, the answer is “Yes.” This is the GUID clustered index post that had to be. It’s inevitable with this tool. If you follow SQL Server at all, you are probably aware of the long-standing debate about whether it is wise, desirable,...(read more)

Visualizing Data File Layout II

2013-01-23T23:40:02Z

Part 2 of a blog series visually demonstrating the layout of objects on data pages in SQL Server Part 1 In Part 1 of this series, I introduced a little demo app that renders the layout of pages in SQL Server files by object. Today I’ll put that app through its paces to show, in vivid color (well, teal, anyway) the destructive power of the famous Re-Index Then Shrink anti-pattern for index maintenance. This one is very easy to demo, so let’s go! First, I created a demo database VizDemo1 , with a single...(read more)

Visualizing Data File Layout I

2013-01-22T22:50:34Z

Part 1 of a blog series visually demonstrating the layout of objects on data pages in SQL Server Some years ago a gentleman called Danny Gould created a free tool called Internals Viewer for SQL Server . I’m a visual sort of guy, and I always thought it would be fun and educational to make a simple visualizer, like the one he created, in order to view how objects are laid out in SQL Server files, and to use it to demonstrate how operations like re-index and shrink affect the layout of files. To that...(read more)

Update to Rules-Driven Maintenance

2013-01-16T18:34:00Z

Back in August I posted a first version of a rules-driven solution for backups, index and statistics maintenance and integrity checks. The system in general has been working well, and has saved my team a huge amount of time and effort. We are coming to the anniversary of its use in production soon. Today I offer an update that contains a few enhancements, performance improvements and a bug fix. To recap, this is a system or framework to manage many small databases across many instances on many servers...(read more)

Updated Warehouse Re-Index Script

2013-01-15T00:30:00Z

As I talked about in my last post , I just went through a re-indexing project that took the partitioned fact rows from our warehouse and relocated them into new files. There are a lot of tables and indexes involved, so I have a PowerShell “helper” script to generate the actual T-SQL that moves the data. The idea is to find all the indexes that use a particular partition scheme in the database, and make the CREATE INDEX statements that would recreate them on the new partition scheme. This script doesn’t...(read more)