Rod Colledge Planning for Disaster There is a certain paradox in being advised to expect the unexpected, but the DBA must plan and prepare in... 16 March 2010 16 min read
Tony Davis Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management views – eBook Download This is the book that will de-mystify the process of using Dynamic Management Views to collect the information you need... 15 March 2010 4 min read
Buck Woody Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 Engine Post-Installation Even an experienced DBA finds it safer to double-check that all the tasks have been done, and in the right... 03 March 2010 3 min read
Robert Sheldon Adding a KPI to an SQL Server Analysis Services Cube Key Performance Indicators, which vary according to the application, are widely used as a measure of the performance of parts... 02 March 2010 14 min read
Phil Factor Exploring your database schema with SQL In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL... 02 March 2010 23 min read
Jonathan Lewis Designing Efficient SQL: A Visual Approach Sometimes, it is a great idea to push away the keyboard when tackling the problems of an ill-performing, complex, query,... 25 February 2010 16 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Defensive Database Programming Inside this book, you will find dozens of practical, defensive programming techniques that will improve the quality of your T-SQL... 22 February 2010 3 min read
Andrew Clarke Who Tests the Tester? It is scarcely surprising that it can take up to five years to release a new version of SQL Server... 19 February 2010 15 min read
Joe Celko Procedural, Semi-Procedural and Declarative Programming in SQL A lot of the time, the key to making SQL databases perform well is to take a break from the... 15 February 2010 10 min read
Buck Woody Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 General Maintenance There is nothing that beats a simple checklist for ensuring that things don't get forgotten in the Database Maintenance process.... 15 February 2010 3 min read
Laerte Junior Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 3 – Collation and Fragmentation In this final look into his everyday essentials, Laerte Junior provides some useful scripts for the DBA that use an... 11 February 2010 15 min read
Buck Woody Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 Performance Tuning Task List In which Buck Woody imagines how the US military would have tackled DBA checklists for 'mission-critical' databases. And having imagined... 04 February 2010 3 min read
Kathi Kellenberger Writing Efficient SQL: Set-Based Speed Phreakery Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge is an event where coders battle to produce the fastest code to solve a... 04 February 2010 31 min read
Josef Richberg Simple Query tuning with STATISTICS IO and Execution plans A great deal can be gleaned from the use of the STATISTICS IO and the execution plan, when you are... 04 February 2010 21 min read
Phil Factor Finding Stuff in SQL Server Database DDL You'd have thought that nothing would be easier than using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for searching through the DDL... 04 February 2010 24 min read
Paul Nielsen Switching rows and columns in SQL When they use SQL Server, one the commoner questions that Ms Access programmers ask is 'Where's the TRANSFORM/PIVOT command? So... 04 February 2010 4 min read
Robert Sheldon Implementing User-Defined Hierarchies in SQL Server Analysis Services To be able to drill into multidimensional cube data at several levels, you must implement all of the hierarchies on... 02 February 2010 13 min read
Bob Cramblitt SQL Search- The Search and the Sequel It started out as an experiment to try to explore different ways of creating a software tool that people would... 02 February 2010 8 min read
Laerte Junior Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 2 – The Morning Checklist Laerte Junior takes us further into the world of an Exceptional PowerShell DBA, showing us how he uses PowerShell 2.0... 21 January 2010 15 min read
Rodney Landrum Managing Data Growth in SQL Server 'Help, my database ate my disk drives!'. Many DBAs spend most of their time dealing with variations of the problem... 21 January 2010 37 min read