Robert Sheldon Getting Started with Extended Events in SQL Server 2012 Extended Events provide a way of unintrusively monitoring what's going on in a SQL Server instance. Unlike SQL Server Profiler... 04 February 2013 16 min read
Gail Shaw The SQL Server Instance That Will not Start Everyone's SQL Server nightmare: The instance will not start. If such a problem strikes you, keep calm, follow Gail's advice,... 17 January 2013 29 min read
Grant Fritchey The Seven Sins against TSQL Performance There are seven common antipatterns in TSQL coding that make code perform badly, and three good habits which will generally... 31 July 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 Database Growth and Autogrowth Settings It's easy to create a database nowadays with point-'n-click, but if you've left your database's autogrowth settings at their default,... 23 November 2011 19 min read
PowerShell Sean Duffy in PowerShell Disk Space Monitoring and Early Warning with PowerShell Sean Duffy recently had an unwelcome encounter with Exchange Server Back Pressure, which cut off his message flow due to... 15 August 2011 11 min read
Benjamin Nevarez The SQL Server Query Optimizer To understand how to write SQL code for SQL Server that performs well, it is important to appreciate how the... 03 August 2011 35 min read
Feodor Georgiev The default trace in SQL Server – the power of performance and security auditing Since the introduction of SQL Server 2005, there is a simple lightweight trace that is left running by default on... 14 March 2011 17 min read
Paul White Understanding and Using Parallelism in SQL Server SQL Server is able to make implicit use of parallelism to speed SQL queries. Quite how it does it, and... 03 March 2011 22 min read
Michelle Ufford Effective Clustered Indexes As a guideline, clustered Indexes should be Narrow, Unique, Static and Ever Increasing (NUSE). Michelle Ufford Explains why. … 06 January 2011 21 min read
Holger Schmeling SQL Server Statistics: Problems and Solutions SQL Server Statistics assist the query optimiser to calculate the best way of running the query. Holger describes every common... 27 October 2010 39 min read
Brad McGehee Brad’s Sure DBA Checklist Sometimes, all a DBA needs, to help with day-to-day work, is a checklist of best-practices and dos and don'ts. It... 20 January 2010 33 min read
Robert Sheldon Managing Transaction Logs in SQL Server The Transaction Log provides the means by which either the complete set of tasks of a database transaction are performed... 12 November 2009 17 min read
Rodney Landrum The DBA as Detective: Troubleshooting Locking and Blocking In this article, taken from Chapter 5 of his great new book, SQL Server Tacklebox, Rodney describes in his own... 31 July 2009 24 min read
Gail Shaw Finding the Causes of Poor Performance in SQL Server, Part 1 To tackle performance problems with applications, you first find the queries that constitute a typical workload, using SQL Profiler: Then,... 09 March 2009 13 min read
Brad McGehee How to Identify Slow Running Queries with SQL Profiler With SQL Server Profiler, it is easy to discover all those queries that are running slowly. Once poorly performing queries... 03 February 2009 40 min read
Grant Fritchey Graphical Execution Plans for Simple SQL Queries Learning how to read and analyze execution plans takes time and effort. But once you gain some experience, you will... 16 December 2008 41 min read
Joe Webb Using Covering Indexes to Improve Query Performance Designers of database systems will often assume that the use of a clustered index is always the best approach. However... 29 September 2008 12 min read
Grant Fritchey Execution Plan Basics Every day, out in the various discussion boards devoted to Microsoft SQL Server, the same types of questions come up... 11 May 2008 44 min read
