In this post we’re going to introduce the basics of CPU scheduling. In a computer system, only one thing can happen at a time. More specifically, only one task can be on a processor at a point in time. This can expand to several tasks if the system has multiple processors or a processor with multiple cores, which most modern systems have. For example, a four core system can potentially execute four tasks concurrently.

My new course “Understanding and Using Essential Tools in Enterprise Linux 7” in now available on Pluralsight here! This course targets IT professionals that design and maintain RHEL based enterprises. It aligns with RHCSA and RHCE objectives and can be used by both the IT pro learning new skills and the senior system administrator preparing for the certification exam Let’s take your LINUX sysadmin skills to the next level and get you started on your RHCSA/RHCE learning path.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLSaturday Pensacola on June 4th 2016! This will be my second SQLSaturday event and I’m really excited that I get to do it as a speaker. I look forward to seeing you there! If you don’t know what SQL Saturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost! If you haven’t been to a SQL Saturday, what are you waiting for!

In my opinion one of the key features of SQL Server 2016 is the rebuilt and optimized log redo mechanism for AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Check out the many new AG features here. Check out my posts here and here to learn about how Availability Groups move data. Early last week I was conducting a load test using SQL Server 2016 and wanted to compare the performance of the log redo thread with that of SQL Server 2014.

Well yesterday was a big day in the SQL Community, Microsoft announced that they will be developing a version of SQL Server for Linux. Check out the announcement here. Image Source – Microsoft – http://bit.ly/1U8Afd3 This leaves us with a lot of questions, in talking with one of my customers this morning he asked some pretty cool questions. Here’s how the conversation went… Do you think it’s going to be a replacement for MySQL/MariaDB?

I’m excited to announce that I have been named a Friend of Redgate for 2016. The program targets influential people in their respective technical communities such as SQL, .NET and ALM and enables us to participate in the conversation around product and community development. Last year was my first year in the program and the value that it provides to the community is immeasurable. I got to see first hand the dedication Redgate has to the SQL community and to making great software.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLSaturday Chicago on March 5th 2016! This will be my first SQLSaturday event and I’m really excited that I get to do it as a speaker. I look forward to seeing you there! My presentation is “Performance Monitoring AlwaysOn Availability Groups” Here’s the abstract for the talk Have you deployed Availability Groups in your data center? Are you monitoring your Availability Groups to ensure you can meet your recovery objectives?

Update for T-SQL Tuesday #84 Well, this year I was challenged with the goal of speaking publicly three times, well I blew that out of the water and have spoken 8 times (one of which was a major IT conference) this year with one more on deck for Friday at the Albuquerque SQL Server User Group. I never thought it would have gone this far, but it certainly is fun and exciting.

What I’ve noticed this year is that there’s really not another group of people like the SQL Community. Earlier this year Paul Randal ( b | t ), in the name of community, offered his services to mentor to a small group of people. Check it out here. Crazy as it may sound he went ahead and offered mentoring to everyone that submitted here and I was on that list. Here’s my blog post submission

In our final post in our “Load Testing Your Storage Subsystem with Diskspd” series, we’re going to look at output from Diskspd and run some tests and interpret results. In our first post we showed how performance can vary based on access pattern and IO size. In our second post we showed how to design a test to highlight those performance characteristics and in this post we’ll execute those tests and review the results.