Jonathan Kehayias Optimizing tempdb configuration with SQL Server 2012 Extended Events One of the most obvious bottlenecks in the performance of tempdb is caused by PAGELATCH, in-memory latch contention on the... 13 July 2012 20 min read
Warwick Rudd Encrypting Your SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Databases It is likely that you'll want to add a database with TDS Encryption to your AlwaysOn Availability Group. If you... 04 July 2012 8 min read
Glenn Berry Provisioning a New SQL Server Instance – Part One Before you even install SQL Server, there a number of preparatory steps you need to take in order to get... 21 June 2012 11 min read
Laerte Junior The PoSh DBA – The Attributes of Advanced Functions Once you pass that point of just hurriedly writing PowerShell scripts for immediate use and start to write PowerShell functions... 19 June 2012 18 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Developing Low-Maintenance Databases Alex's team of developers are geared to doing rapid development of database applications in a busy corporate setting, yet take... 12 June 2012 21 min read
Peter Larsson The Road to Professional Database Development: Database Normalization Not only is the process of normalisation valuable for increasing data quality and simplifying the process of modifying data, but... 07 June 2012 27 min read
Joe Sack A first look at SQL Server 2012 Availability Group Wait Statistics If you are trouble-shooting an AlwaysOn Availability Group topology, a study of the wait statistics will give a pointer to... 21 May 2012 15 min read
Warwick Rudd SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn SQL Server AlwaysOn provides a high-availability and Disaster-recovery solution for SQL Server 2012. It makes use of existing SQL Server... 15 May 2012 19 min read
Jonathan Kehayias Handling Deadlocks in SQL Server In this excerpt from his book Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for the Accidental DBA, Jonathan Kehayias provides a guide... 10 May 2012 45 min read
Greg Larsen SQL Server Transaction Log Fragmentation: a Primer Generally, you will have no need to worry about the number of virtual log files in your transaction log. However,... 26 April 2012 17 min read
Buck Woody Big Data is Just a Fad The Term 'Big Data' is nothing more than a fad, and we'll soon be cringing with embarrassment at the thought... 13 April 2012 12 min read
Grant Fritchey How to Get Information About Your Backups When you need to restore but aren't 100% sure about the contents of your backup files, what do you do?... 23 March 2012 18 min read
Phil Factor Generating Data for Database Tests It is more and more essential for developers to work on development databases that have realistic data in both type... 08 March 2012 22 min read
Luciano Moreira No Significant Fragmentation? Look Closer… If you are relying on using 'best-practice' percentage-based thresholds when you are creating an index maintenance plan for a SQL... 28 February 2012 9 min read
Peter Larsson The Road to Professional Database Development: Set-Based Thinking Under the pseudonym of 'SwePeso', Peter Larsson is famous on SQL forums for the amazing performance he can get from... 21 February 2012 7 min read
Phil Factor Automated Script-generation with Powershell and SMO In the first of a series of articles on automating the process of building, modifying and copying SQL Server databases,... 03 February 2012 24 min read
Robert Sheldon Converting String Data to XML and XML to String Data We all appreciate that, in general, XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server,... 01 February 2012 18 min read
Brad McGehee How to Document and Configure SQL Server Instance Settings Occasionally, when you install identical databases on two different SQL Server instances, they will behave in surprisingly different ways. Why?... 30 January 2012 74 min read
Rob Garrison What’s the Point of Using VARCHAR(n) Anymore? The arrival of the (MAX) data types in SQL Server 2005 were one of the most popular feature for the... 30 January 2012 11 min read
Phil Factor Confessions of a DBA: My worst mistake Over the next few months, we'll be asking various well-known DBAs to describe their worst disaster caused by a mistake... 23 January 2012 6 min read
