Grant Fritchey Why is that SQL Server Instance under stress? There are several reliable indications, using SQL Queries, of the what is causing SQL Server performance problems. Some of these... 11 September 2012 14 min read
Gail Shaw Gail Shaw’s SQL Server Howlers For the latest in our series of SQL Server Howlers, we asked Gail Shaw which common SQL Server mistakes and... 14 August 2012 22 min read
Dave Ballantyne Cleaning Up SQL Server Deployment Scripts Although, generally speaking, source control is the truth, a database doesn't quite conform to the ideal because the target schema... 02 August 2012 22 min read
Phil Factor PowerShell SMO: Just Writing Things Once Sometimes, you can tire of writing the same PowerShell code once again. After this happened to Phil whilst keying in... 19 July 2012 26 min read
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
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
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
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
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