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• Welcoming Gavin Payne to Coeo

  - by Christian

  I’m very pleased to announce that Gavin Payne starts with us today as a Senior Consultant! We’ve known Gavin for a while now through his work in the UK SQL Server Community and when a role came up in our consulting practice I took the opportunity to talk to him about it. Gavin brings a broad range of experience from his recent background as a Solution Architect and has a particular interest in virtualization which is very prominent in the work that we do so we’re thrilled to have him on board. He’s also presenting a couple of sessions at the upcoming SQLBits conference in Brighton where Coeo is once again sponsoring and exhibiting so be sure to congratulate him in person if you’re going to be there! Gavin has a prolific online presence so be sure to subscribe to his blog and follow him on twitter! Blog: http://blog.gavinpayneuk.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/gavinpayneuk SQLBits: http://sqlbits.com/Speakers/Gavin_Payne   Welcome Gavin! Christian Bolton  - MCA, MCM, MVP Technical Director http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

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• New UK SQL Server community event

  - by GavinPayneUK

  I’m pleased to announce that with the support of VMware I will be holding a new UK SQL Server community event in January 2011. Wednesday January 19th 2011 6.45-9.00pm Free registration required, free parking on-site Registration link here SQL Server in the Evening , hosted at VMware’s UK headquarters in Frimley in Surrey, will cover contemporary technology topics for those using SQL Server in 2011, as well as providing a chance to make and meet with SQL Server community friends. The event will have...(read more)

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• The role of the Infrastructure DBA

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Do you have someone performing an Infrastructure DBA role within your organisation? Do you realise why today you now might need one? When I first started working with SQL Server there were three distinct roles in the SQL Server virtual team: developer , DBA and sysadmin . In my simple terms, the developer looked after the “code”: the schema, stored procedures, and any ETL to get data in, out or updated within the database. They could talk in business entity terms about Customer numbers, Product codes...(read more)

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• What’s coming up

  - by GavinPayneUK

  In the last couple of months my community activities list has had things leave it and new things join it, so I thought share, and promote, my future plans. Microsoft Certified Architect : SQL Server – Giving back Preparing for my MCA Board was the hardest, yet in hindsight the most rewarding and interesting, thing I’ve ever done.  The subjects it covers still interest me to the extent that I’m now contributing to the MCA programme itself, allowing the next people through the certification’s...(read more)

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• How many per-core licenses do I need?

  - by GavinPayneUK

    With SQL Server 2012, your licensing requirements can chose to use or be required to use a per-core model depending on the edition you’re deploying. This is a change to previous editions which used a per-CPU socket model that made counting how many per-CPU licences you needed easier – cores and HyperThreading didn’t influence the CPU socket count.  Any complications which people did have typically came from running SQL Server in a virtualised environment, was a vCPU a socket or did licensing...(read more)

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• Decoding an affinity mask

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Recently, in preparation for my SQLBits NUMA internals session I began looking at some of the SQLOS DMVs and trying to understand how their contents directly related to the physical server architecture that SQL Server was running on. While their contents used regular terms such as node and affinity mask the results were often in an “internals” format that can be distracting to the human reader.  An example of this is the DMV sys.dm_os_nodes (link to Technet here ), or more specifically the column...(read more)

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• Southampton SQL Server User Group–February 2011

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Earlier this week I attended the second sitting of the Southampton SQL Server user group, one of the regional events which compliments the larger SQL Server events we put in our diaries. The event is very well organised by Mark Pryce-Maher ( twitter ), Matt Whitfield ( twitter ) and Adrian Hills ( twitter ) in an easy to find Southampton church hall room with drinks and pizza supplied in addition to quality time with fellow SQL Server peers.  Thanks must also go to another of the event’s supporters...(read more)

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• PAL–Performance Analysis of Logs

  - by GavinPayneUK

  I was doing some research earlier this week on SQL Server related troubleshooting tools and was surprised I’d forgotten about Microsoft’s PAL tool – Performance Analysis of Logs. PAL is a free PowerShell UI based tool from Microsoft that creates a perfmon template which can then be used to capture counters most relevant to a high-level performance review PAL will them give for specific Microsoft server deployments, SQL Server being one of them.  Everyone knows what perfmon does, probably too...(read more)

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• Coeo sessions at SQLSaturday Cambridge

  - by GavinPayneUK

  This weekend saw the UK’s first SQLSaturday organised by Mark Broadbent, and held in Cambridge, that was without doubt a huge success. Coeo were lucky to have four of us present a staggering five sessions on the day; so thank you to the SQLSaturday team for selecting our sessions, and to those who chose to attend them. I’ve put a link to the presentation slides for all of our sessions below: I want to be a better architect - Gavin Payne Slides here NUMA internals of SQL Server 2012 – Gavin Payne...(read more)

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• Efficient, partial, point-in-time database restores

  - by GavinPayneUK

  This article is about a situation that many of us could describe the theoretical approach to solving, but then struggle to understand why SQL Server wasn’t following that theoretical approach when you tried it for real. Earlier this week, I had a client ask about the best way to perform: a partial database restore, 1 of 1300 filegroups; to a specific point in time; using a differential backup, and therefore; without restoring each transaction log backup taken since the full backup. The last point...(read more)

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• 70-432 Done

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Today I took and passed my first Microsoft exam, 70-432, MCTS SQL Server 2008 DBA etc.  I’m going to be harsh on my success and say while it’s great to pass an exam someone with my level of experience should be focussing on the next harder exam rather than how great is was to pass an MCTS level exam. Having written about my preparation for the exam I thought it would be good to share my experiences during the exam. Before I start in depth I’ll make three key points: No exam is easy, unless you...(read more)

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• Community Event Leader Tools

  - by GavinPayneUK

  As many of you know, I run a small SQL Server community event here in the UK, SQL Server in the Evening, with the help of Coeo colleague and MVP Justin Langford.  There’s been half a dozen evening events in the last 16 months and recently it got to the point where I needed to start putting proper tools in place to communicate with my event’s followers.  As well as telling them when the next event is it’d also be nice to share some of the Chapter Leader mails I get from Pass etc.  ...(read more)

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• Read Committed Snapshot Isolation– Two Considerations

  - by GavinPayneUK

    The Read Committed Snapshot database option in SQL Server, known perhaps more accurately as Read Committed Snapshot Isolation or RCSI, can be enabled to help readers from blocking writers and writers from blocking readers.  However, enabling it can cause two issues with the tempdb database which are often overlooked. One can slow down queries, the other can cause queries to fail . Overview of RCSI Enabling the option changes the behaviour of the default SQL Server isolation level, read...(read more)

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• The changing shape of the Business Intelligence marketplace: Applications vs. Platforms

  - by GavinPayneUK

  I recently read the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence ( link ) which put Microsoft as a leader.  However, what was more interesting for me than Microsoft’s success was how as an industry we see BI as a single marketplace, business requirement and vision, despite in my view it now being two separate areas: BI applications and BI platforms . As this article will discuss in more depth we now have two communities with differing requirements, our IT departments and our business...(read more)

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• Technology Insights

  - by GavinPayneUK

  In my day job I speak to both technical and business people about the subjects which matter to them the most, in depths of detail which please them the most.  This allows me to ensure the technical people work in a way that meets the client’s business goals.   Sadly, I sometimes meet technical people who due to time constraints or lack of opportunity rarely get to do anything but focus on the bits, bytes, parameters and switches which they need to manage in order to make the “machine do...(read more)

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• Just what SQL Azure needed? A compelling business feature–Reporting

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Those of us who let ourselves be the target of Microsoft’s marketing will be very aware that SQL Azure has been around for a year now and that a (very) small number of people are using it for their cloud based apps and a few more as a development test bed. In summary, the reason for this is because what we’ve yet to see for SQL Azure is: mass adoption by developers therefore taking the service into production it become a default deployment option for commercial shrink wrapped applications a list...(read more)

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• The first SQL Server in the Evening event

  - by GavinPayneUK

  On Wednesday 19 th January I held my first SQL Server in the Evening event at VMware’s UK headquarters in Frimley, Surrey and while the event opened my eyes as to the amount of work needed before and after the event it would not have been possible without four groups of people: Those who attended – I think I counted around 18 of you, the event was for you so I’m glad you came and later said you’d all come again. Those who hosted us – VMware – we were given the nicest facilities you could have asked...(read more)

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• How are people using virtualisation with SQL Server? Part 3

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Monitoring After CPU, memory and storage, monitoring is the fourth thing which changes massively according to Brent Ozar’s list when you move to virtualisation. Some of the performance counters we used to organise our lives around become meaningless and the performance of the host server is often over-looked when looking for problems. What’s encouraging here is that the majority of people are already looking beyond the performance of virtual server and at the performance of the host server. This...(read more)

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• Replication Presentation at the Southampton User Group

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Last night I delivered a presentation about SQL Server’s replication services to Mark Pryce-Maher’s user group in Southampton. As those who were there saw this is a massive topic and to deliver anything but a high level overview in 45 minutes does an injustice to the subject.  Therefore, what I gave the Wednesday night audience was a deliberately high level introduction through my slides with an accompanying detailed commentary as well as answering questions as we went along. The great thing...(read more)

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• How are people using virtualisation with SQL Server? Part 1

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Allow me to share with you the results of a survey I did about how people are using virtualisation with SQL Server. This is a three part series of articles sharing the results. In December 2010 I did a 10 question survey to see how people were using virtualisation with SQL Server and if they were changing their deployment and management processes as a result. 21 people responded from at least Europe, the US and Asia Pac. It’s not a massive number but it was large enough to see some trends and some...(read more)

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• Through the Virtual Microscope–SQL Server and Hyper-V

  - by GavinPayneUK

  In my recent SQLBits conference session, Through the Virtual Looking Glass available to watch here , I spoke about monitoring SQL Server in a virtualised environment.  We looked at good and bad contention, where resource pressures which can adversely affect SQL Server might come from and most importantly how we can monitor the environment to detect them. Since then, I’ve been in discussions with some of the Microsoft product team who are focussed on optimising Windows 8 Hyper-V and SQL Server...(read more)

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• Test Preparation Materials

  - by GavinPayneUK

  I wrote an article on my personal blog a few weeks ago about my preparation for my first Microsoft exam, 70-432.  ( link )  Since then I’ve been reading and demo’ing all the relevant features of SQL Server in the hope that if I get questions on them I’ll be prepared. I’ve learnt a few things in the last couple of weeks, some good, some bad which I’ll now share. The first thing I found is that learning about how SQL Server works is fun and interesting, far better than spending an evening...(read more)

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• What to do with DATETIMEOFFSET?

  - by GavinPayneUK

  Someone asked me today if the time zone of a specific instance of SQL Server could be changed to match the country which that instance served. Some database products allow you to set this at an engine level which made me wonder if your data’s time fields “move” with the time zone setting of the database server instance?  If something was logged as happening at 9am Paris time it happened then, if I change my database server parameters did that event now happen at 9am New York time?  Perhaps...(read more)

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• Just what comes in the box?

  - by GavinPayneUK

  As a SQL Server architect/consultant/advisor/advocate/you name it, one of my roles is to advise clients on the best solution for their requirements and their budget .  That last piece may seem like common sense but people often forget with SQL Server where the dividing line between the Standard and Enterprise editions sits.  Knowing what comes in each edition, or more commonly what doesn’t come in Standard Edition especially in the area of high availability, is critical for me when I’m...(read more)

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• How are people using virtualisation with SQL Server? Part 2

  - by GavinPayneUK

  This is part two of an article reviewing the results of a virtualisation with SQL Server survey I performed. Part one can be found here. How do you size a new virtual server? When deploying a new virtual server you want to size it according to its predicted workload knowing that additional resource can be allocated as required. Unlike physical servers giving your virtual server more resource than it actually needs can actually be a bad thing, if nothing else if you’ve got resource you’re not using...(read more)

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