Month: March 2019

Women in Tech Talk Tech

  By

March is Women’s History Month, to celebrate the PASS Women in Technology Virtual Group (@PASS_WIT) held a webcast featuring prominent woman in the Data Platform community. I had the pleasure of being one of five panelists alongside these amazing women Lori Edwards (B|T), Malathi Mahadevan (B|T), Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman (B|T), and Catherine Wilhemsen (B|T). Discussion ranged from direct technical topics to what it’s like being a woman in tech. Women took turns providing advice around having a degree and/or certification to succeed in tech. We discussed how to keep up with advances in the field and skills that technologists should have.… Continue Reading

Enable Mail Profile – Back to Basics

  By

I’ve seen many people go through the trouble of setting up database mail and configuring SQL Agent Alerts only to realize it’s not working. The reason in the cases I’ve seen is because they have simply neglected to assign a mail profile to SQL Agent. This is way more common than you would think, thus I wrote this quick blog. This check box and drop down can sometimes lead to hours of troubleshooting if you don’t know where to look. In order to receive the alerts, you must enable a mail profile. This would be the profile  created during the… Continue Reading

How Your Hypervisor Can Impact Your CPU

  By

Recently I had a client complain of chronic high CPU utilization. The performance of their SQL Server had degraded, and it appeared to be related to higher than normal CPU utilization in conjunction with symptoms of unresponsive user queries.  The root cause was twofold—a third party hosting provider had overallocated virtual processors on the physical host where the virtual machine (VM) running SQL Server was residing, as well as a recent upgrade from a version of VMWare that was not patched for Spectre and Meltdown. The host had 16 physical cores and was hyperthreading (making it effectively 32 cores) until… Continue Reading