Grant Fritchey

Grant Fritchey is a Data Platform MVP with over 30 years' experience in IT, including time spent in support and development. He has worked with SQL Server since 6.0 back in 1995. He has also developed in VB, VB.NET, C#, and Java. Grant has written books for Apress and Simple-Talk. Grant presents at conferences and user groups, large and small, all over the world. Grant volunteers for PASS and is on the Board of Directors as the Immediate Past President. He joined Redgate Software as a product advocate January 2011.

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02 August 2017
02 August 2017

Automated Database Provisioning for Development and Testing

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If your development team needs to work on anonymised copies of the current production database, and if changes are being delivered rapidly as well, that could mean a lot of time and routine DevOps work copying databases. SQL Clone was designed for tasks like this. Grant Fritchey investigates whether you save time, effort and scripting over the more traditional approach, and at what point it makes sense to use it.… Read more
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04 November 2016
04 November 2016

SQL Server Database Provisioning

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Database provisioning for development work isn't always easy. The better that development teams meet business demands for rapid delivery and high quality, the more complex become the requirements for the work of development and testing. More databases are required for testing and development, and they need to be more rapidly kept current. Data and loading needs to match more closely what is in production. Grant Fritchey explains.… Read more
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13 October 2016
13 October 2016

Your Professional Development and the PASS Organization

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There are so many ways of keeping your technical skills and knowledge up-to-date. There are books, articles, conferences, video courses and so on, but nothing beats discussion and debate with professional people in other organisations facing a similar range of technical challenges, some of which you share, and others you maybe haven't yet. PASS is unique in providing just this vital ingredient for database professionals using the Microsoft Data Stack.… Read more
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05 October 2016
05 October 2016

Who the Devil Wrote This SQL Code?

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The way that you format T-SQL code can affect the productivity of the people who have to subsequently maintain your work. It is never a good experience to see SQL Code, cry out “Who the devil wrote this code?”, and then realise that it was you. Grant gives some examples of bad formatting and explains why you should never check-in badly-formatted SQL code.… Read more
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19 February 2016
19 February 2016

Better Ways to Build a Database

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The purpose of a database build is simple: prove that what you have in version control can successfully create a working database. And yet many teams struggle with unreliable and untested database build processes that slow down deployments and prevent the delivery of new functionality. Grant Fritchey explains how to achieve an automated and reliable database build that is only as complex as the database system it needs to create.… Read more
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04 November 2015
04 November 2015

Using SQL Prompt to Accelerate the Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts

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There may be some people who enjoy repetitive typing, but Grant Fritchey doesn't. He's always preferred SQL Prompt. The standard snippets suit developers fine but aren't so DBA-oriented, so he set about asking the SQLServerCentral community what they typed in the most, and set about producing a set of DBA snippets with the results. … Read more
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15 October 2015
15 October 2015

Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts

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What are the scripts that a working DBA uses so often that they become part of the 'muscle memory'? Grant Fritchey asked the question on the forums of SQL Server Central. From the large response, Grant was able to pick out the ten most popular T-SQL commands, scripts, or fragments. It seems as if, despite the range of tasks we do, there are some common tools we use.… Read more
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12 January 2015
12 January 2015

Why Developers Need to Understand Execution Plans

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As a coder, the more you know about the business, the better code you're going to write. The more you know about the language in which you code regularly, the better code you're going to write. Similarly, if you're tasked with writing code against a relational database engine, you're going to need to know more about that engine. If you can examine and understand execution plans, you can achieve better understanding of the database system and you will write better database code. Grant Fritchey shows you how.… Read more
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16 December 2014
16 December 2014

Database Build Automation – The First Step to Continuous Integration

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So you're keen to take the first steps to the continuous integration of your database. You have to start by getting your database into source control. You can then begin to automate your build processes in order to generate and test a database. By doing this regularly, you'll be much better prepared for the deployment process because you'll have solved integration issues when they happen, and facilitated the broader testing process.… Read more
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08 July 2014
08 July 2014

Why Put Your Database into Source Control?

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Checking program code into source control is a daily ritual for most developers, but versioning database code is less well-understood. Grant Fritchey argues that getting your databases under source control is not only vital for the stability of development and deployment, but it will make your life easier when something does go wrong.… Read more
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26 June 2014
26 June 2014

Rollback and Recovery Troubleshooting; Challenges and Strategies

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What happens if your database deployment goes awry? Do you restore from a backup or snapshot and lose all the data changes that have happened since then? Do you prepare rollback scripts to revert the changes whilst preserving the data? Do you branch by abstraction and toggle off the changes? Have you a blue-green deployment that can be switched? Do you quickly roll forward? … Read more
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10 December 2013
10 December 2013

SQL Enlight for SQL Server Management Studio

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The process of doing SQL code-reviews used to be tedious and error-prone. Until SQL Enlight, it was a process that was difficult to automate for release and deployment. As it is now both a Command-line utility and an SSMS add-in, the database developer can see immediately the parts of the code that would raise eyebrows with the vigilant production DBA.… Read more
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14 August 2013
14 August 2013

Database Administration as a Service

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A DBA should provide two things, a service and leadership. For Grant Fritchey, it was whilst serving a role in the Scouts of America that he had his epiphany. Creative chaos and energy, if tactfully harnessed and directed, led to effective ways to perform team-based tasks. Then he wondered why these skills couldn't be applied to the workplace. Are we DBAs doing it wrong in the way we interact with our co-workers?… Read more
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15 May 2013
15 May 2013

The DBA Detective: The Case of the Missing Index

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When problems arise in SQL Server, we're faced with a server full of suspects, including disk I/O, memory, CPU, incorrect or missing indexes, badly written T-SQL code, out of date statistics, and full disk drives. All of these have motive and opportunity to murder the performance of our databases, and it's the DBA's job to collar the culprit, quickly without relying on luck or heroics.… Read more
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