I am a father, but my children do not call me “Padre”. I received my nick name back in 1991 while staffing the Boy Scouts of America national high adventure base, Philmont Scout Ranch.
I was a Wrangler on staff at Philmont and Rod Taylor, Philmont’s full-time Cowboy gave me the nickname when he learned I was aspiring to be an Episcopal priest.
I have kept the name through the years, as my pledge name for Kappa Kappa Psi and some of my friends do call me Padre. When I began blogging it only made sense to become “SQL Padre”.
Being dyslexic, reading is hard and frustrating especially for someone whow actually enjoys absorbing knowledge and learning.
I have actually read very little in my life time but now I hope to change that. I am starting to read again, and to help me keep focused I hope to write about the things I read. These will be work related, but mostly pleasure reading. Warning: I love Star Wars.
I won’t abondan technology based posts, in fact my next read is DBATools in a month of lunches. I am still very interested in learning about my craft.
First up, MASH by Richard Hooker. As a fan of the movie and TV series, I knew I had to read this. I am not sure what I was expecting but it was a little bit of a let down. The movie (for once) was actually a little better than the book. The story lines were more fleshed out in the movie. And the movie had a few additional story lines that were not in the book. But all in all, a good read.
Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.
Well, this WordPress prompt is really quite easy to answer: writing blog posts!! Ha ha
I always have great intentions of writing, but I always fall short. I truly thought being a new “empty nester” I would have more time on my hands. Well, that didn’t go as planned.
And the embarrassing thing is I absolutely love training, learning new things and imparting that knowledge. For the past 15+ years, I have been an adult volunteer for the Boy Scouts of America. In that time, I have participated in local, regional and national training courses. I was instrumental in beginning out council’s University of Scouting. I have staffed multiple local, regional, and national training courses for both youth and adults. I have presented multiple times at various SQL Saturdays. I saw all that not to brag, but to show I truly do love training and imparting knowledge. I guess I am more of an in person trainer, not a writer.
One of the hardest part of writing is determining the subject matter. I believe if given a topic, I could figure it all out. Another issue with flogging is the fear that I am writing about things that have been done to death. No one wants to read duplicate topics. It is hard to be original.
I hope to do better. I will set new goals and task myself with doing one blog post a month to start. If I can accomplish that, maybe increase frequency of blog posts. Maybe, haha!
This is the 2nd post in my “Back 2 Basics” series following the introduction of topics.
Part of a DBAs role is to ensure SQL Server is installed and configured properly for optimal performance. Just about every DBA that has any experience validates their SQL installations with a checklist. For years, my “go-to” checklist was Brent Ozar’s SQL Server Installation Checklist. It has been a few years since it has been updated; but it still is the standard. Based off his and many other I wrote my own check list of things to do on installation of a SQL Server.
These are the important things you need to remember when it comes to an installation checklist or a checklist for optimal performance.
For me, if I am given a new SQL instance to manage or installing a new SQL instance these are my personal checklist items:
Individual Volumes for Data (mdf) and Transaction Log (ldf) files
Auto Growth Settings
Auto-Shrink
Auto-Close
Auto-Update Stats
Compatibility Level
Setup Maintenance – I recommend Ola Hallengren Scripts for this. Ola’s scripts are world famous script used to manage all your databases. On smaller setups, you can install and configure with a single script and never have to worry again. However, I strongly recommend you learn the ins & outs of his scripts to customize them for your needs. You can even extend its functionality with Configuration Tables.
Padre's SQL Resort 