I wish page splits were delicious. 

What are page splits?

Page splits occur when a data page gets filled with data and a new page is needed to make room for new data.  There are times when data modification causes data to be inserted in the middle of a page, this causes...

Many of us have not made the effort to switch from profiler to Extended events.  It's 2018, if you haven't found a few hours to learn about this incredibly powerful tool, I urge you to do so now. 

I'm going to provide a quick means of tracking queries with extended...

Running CheckDB regularly is important for the integrity of your database. It's suggested that we run this as often as possible, so that we know right away if we have a corruption issue. (this is also a good reason to take regular database and log backups). 

The only pr...

In the past we're used to enabling Traceflags 1117 and 1118 in order to help with TempDB Contention. With the release of SQL 2016, these were no longer needed...however

Now it's been suggested to enable Traceflag 3427.

Why? Because  a new type of contention has emerged c...

What is a session timeout?

This is a property that dictates how many seconds an availability replica waits for a (ping) response from another replica in the Availability Group considering the connection to have timed out and thus failed.

The default settings is set to te...

Page Life Expectancy is the number of seconds the average page of data has been in the buffer pool.SQL server keeps data pages in memory for quicker access instead of having to read from disk every time.

Now, keep in mind that Page Life Expectancy doesn’t prove or dispr...

So, your manager wants you to figure out how to encrypt sensitive Data? Well Microsoft has introduced a fairly easy way to configure feature called Always Encrypted.

What is it?

Always Encrypted was introduced in SQL Server 2016. It is an encryption feature that is inten...

Why should I use Query Store?

Query store can be used for a number of things.  For example:

• Find out what was happening on my server last night?

• Identify and fix queries suffering from parameter sniffing or plan regression

• Testing (ie - when upgrading to a...

It's becoming less surprising, but no less scary when I find shops not taking regular database backups. This happens quite often in situations where there is no dedicated DBA. Meaning someone else just kind of took over those responsibilities ("accidental DBA", if you...