A Senior SQL Server DBA based in the North West of England
A Senior SQL Server DBA based in the North West of England
As a DBA, you will be familiar with the scenario of an application being sourced from an external supplier. In this scenario, to try and improve performance is either to present your findings to the supplier and hope they make…
Anyone who has had to administer SQL Server replication will be familiar with incoming incidents regarding subscriber data being out of sync with the publisher database. Without 3rd party monitoring tools to help alert or track when things fall behind,…
Ducking and diving Like most IT professionals, one usually aspires to have cutting-edge kit where financially feasible. In my case, I built a catch-all desktop rig last year for software development, virtualisation, and gaming. Previously, I usually had a gaming…
(Expectant) In the first part of this series, I played around with DuckDB, which involved setting it up and plugging it into an existing datasource (Postgres). This data source was the copy of StackOverflow from SmartPostgres. In this part, I…
(Buzzing) DuckDB is a portable, single-process OLAP-focused database that is getting a lot of traction in various data/database communities, so I decided to try it out. As I had the Postgres version of the StackOverflow database handy (courtesy of Brent…
(Post rave comedown) (SKIP TO THE END FOR THE RESULTS) Mid last year, I was working on a big side project, and I noticed that the completion times on health check operations on a pre-release version of SQL Server 2025…
(Thirsty work) In part 1 of this series, I wanted to do a sanity check on running local LLMs by asking them to carry out a simple task. The task was to inline a function into the body of a…
(A big sausage dog) Like lots of people who work in IT or have a passing interest in technology, I like to play with LLMs for personal projects and so forth. However, up until now, I’ve been using the big…
(cheeky chap) Currently, I am interested in the impact of enabling change tracking on an environment with a heavy OLTP workload. The current scope is to determine the reduction in performance and the additional storage required by any underlying internal…
(Slow work) As part of a cool side project I am working on, I decided to test the observer overhead of Extended Events for myself on my own kit. Whilst numerous other bloggers have done this, I have decided to…