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.

Follow Grant Fritchey via
25 October 2012
25 October 2012

Hosted Monitoring

0
0
The concept of using services to take the place of writing a lot of your own code goes way, way back in computing history. The fundamentals of the concept go back to the dawn of computing with places like IBM hosting time-shares for computing power that you could rent for short periods of time. But … Read more
0
0
16 October 2012
16 October 2012

SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition, by Grant Fritchey

0
38
Every Database Administrator, developer, report writer, and anyone else who writes T-SQL to access SQL Server data, must understand how to read and interpret execution plans. My book leads you right from the basics of capturing plans, through how to interrupt them in their various forms, graphical or XML, and then how to use the information you find there to diagnose the most common causes of poor query performance, and so optimize your SQL queries, and improve your indexing strategy.… Read more
0
38
17 September 2012
17 September 2012

Getting a Database into Source Control

0
0
For any number of reasons, from simple auditing, to change tracking, to automated deployment, to integration with application development processes, you’re going to want to place your database into source control. Using Red Gate SQL Source Control this process is extremely simple. SQL Source Control works within your SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) interface. This … Read more
0
0
10 September 2012
10 September 2012

Databases in Source Control

0
0
I’ve been working as a database professional for quite a long time. But originally, I was a developer. And I loved being a developer. There was this constant feedback loop of a job well done, your code compiled and it ran. Every time this happened successfully, you’d check it into source control. These days you … Read more
0
0
31 August 2012
31 August 2012

Introduction to Agile Development

0
0
Even though my current job is a little weird, I still consider myself to be a DBA. I didn’t start that way in IT. I came through support and into development. I loved development. There was a constant struggle to attempt to improve your code, your understanding, and, most importantly, the process of development itself. … Read more
0
0
24 August 2012
24 August 2012

PowerShell & SQL Compare

0
0
Just a quick blog post to share a couple of scripts for using PowerShell to call SQL Compare. This is an example from my session at SQL in the City on setting up a sandbox development process. This just runs a compare between a set of scripts and a database and deploys it. set-Location “c:\Program … Read more
0
0
17 August 2012
17 August 2012

Monitoring Your Servers

0
0
If you are the DBA in a large scale enterprise, you’re probably already monitoring your servers for up-time and performance. But if you work for a medium-sized business, a small shop, or even a one-man operation, chances are pretty good that you’re not doing that sort of monitoring. You know that you’re supposed to be … Read more
0
0
23 February 2012
23 February 2012

Tuning Red Gate: #4 of Some

0
0
First time connecting to these servers directly (keys to the kingdom, bwa-ha-ha-ha. oh, excuse me), so I’m going to take a look at the server properties, just to see if there are any issues there. Max memory is set, cool, first possible silly mistake clear. In fact, these look to be nicely set up. Oh, … Read more
0
0
22 February 2012
22 February 2012

Tuning Red Gate: #3 of Lots

0
0
I’m drilling down into the metrics about SQL Server itself available to me in the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor to see what’s up with our two problematic servers. In the previous post I’d noticed that rg-sql01 had quite a few CPU spikes. So one of the first things I want to check there is … Read more
0
0
13 February 2012
13 February 2012

Tuning Red Gate: #2 of Many

0
0
In the last installment, I used the SQL Monitor tool to get a snapshot view of the current state of the servers at Red Gate that are giving us trouble. That snapshot suggested some areas where I should focus some time, primarily in which queries were being called most frequently or were running the longest. … Read more
0
0
09 February 2012
09 February 2012

Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

0
0
Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don’t know, use the monitoring tool to identify … Read more
0
0
19 January 2012
19 January 2012

SQL Cop Review

0
26
Static code analysis is used a lot by application programmers, but there have been surprisingly few tools for SQL development that perform a function analogous to Resharper, dotTest, or CodeRush. Wouldn't it be great to have something that can indicate where there are code-smells, lapses from best practice and so on, in your Database code? Now there is. … Read more
0
26