Quick entry to let you know that Kimberly L. Tripp will be on .NET Rocks tomorrow evening from 7-9p.m. Pacific Time. The show is recorded live and then edited over the weekend. The recorded session will be posted on Monday, August 2nd. Kimberly's plan will be to discuss performance tuning techniques, indexing strategies, the clustered index debate and well, whatever else comes up?! With Carl and Rory you never know what to expect!

For details about the show and a list of past shows click here.

Kevin Collins, a Senior Program Manager with SQL Server CE, climbed Mt. Rainier and summitted on Sunday (with Stephen Forte, fyi). They've got a history of climbing great peaks and well, Kevin said I could share a few of his pics. The pics are all within this entry so it might take a few secs to load. Roughly 1MB in total.

On July 19, Kimberly L. Tripp delivered a 1.5 hour webcast on SQL Server 2000 titled: Index Defragmentation Best Practices. The webcast was well received and generated a TON of questions (again!). Kimberly has compiled a series of blog entries which cover the different areas of questions: Related Resources, General, Clustering Key Choice, Index Usage, Index Fragmentation and a couple more much more in depth entries to come. This blog entry is the first of two on Index Fragmentation, still a couple more to come... Stay tuned!

For those of you who head to the Pacific Northwest on holiday - let me writeup my version of "Three Perfect Days." If you're not familiar with the "Three Perfect Days" series it's one in United Hemispheres - the "inflight" magazine for United. I get the chance to read it all too often and now I want to add my own article...

On July 19, Kimberly L. Tripp delivered a 1.5 hour webcast on SQL Server 2000 titled: Index Defragmentation Best Practices. The webcast was well received and generated a TON of questions (again!). Kimberly has compiled a series of blog entries which cover the different areas of questions: Related Resources, General, Clustering Key Choice, Index Usage, Index Fragmentation and a couple more much more in depth entries to come. This blog entry refers to the Index Usage questions and there are still at least three or so more to go... Stay tuned!

On July 19, Kimberly L. Tripp delivered a 1.5 hour webcast on SQL Server 2000 titled: Index Defragmentation Best Practices. The webcast was well received and generated a TON of questions (again!). Kimberly has compiled a series of blog entries which cover the different areas of questions: Related Resources, General, Clustering Key Choice, Index Usage, Index Fragmentation and a couple more much more in depth entries to come. This blog entry points is the Clustering Key Choice entry. This is the third of three I'm posting tonight and more to come over the weekend. There are still a couple of questions I'm working on AND I've created some really fun demo/learning scripts. Stay tuned!

On July 19, Kimberly L. Tripp delivered a 1.5 hour webcast on SQL Server 2000 titled: Index Defragmentation Best Practices. The webcast was well received and generated a TON of questions (again!). Kimberly has compiled a series of blog entries which cover the different areas of questions: Related Resources, General, Clustering Key Choice, Index Usage, Index Fragmentation and a couple more much more in depth entries to come. This blog entry points is the General Questions entry. This is second of three I'm posting tonight and more to come over the weekend. There are still a couple of questions I'm working on AND I've created some really fun demo/learning scripts. Stay tuned!

On July 19, Kimberly L. Tripp delivered a 1.5 hour webcast on SQL Server 2000 titled: Index Defragmentation Best Practices. The webcast was well received and generated a TON of questions (again!). Kimberly has compiled a series of blog entries which cover the different areas of questions: Related Resources, General, Clustering Key Choice, Index Usage, Index Fragmentation and a couple more much more in depth entries to come. This blog entry points is the Related Resources entry. This is one of three I'm posting tonight and more to come over the weekend. There are still a couple of questions I'm working on AND I've created some really fun demo/learning scripts. Stay tuned!

Monday's MSDN Webcast titled: Indexing for Performance - Index Defrag Best Practices went well and as promised I'm working on a formal write-up of the entire post-webcast Q&A. However, I've not had a chance to complete it... For simplicity I'm going to post what I've got now, wrap it up tomorrow and then make sure to post all of the additional resources on SQLskills.com. For right now, the resources are only listed here and it's quite a list already - roughly 2500 words to start!

As a follow on to last month's Indexing Best Practices Session, Kimberly L. Tripp will deliver an Index Defrag Best Practices session. This session will cover how fragmentation occurs, what it means and the most optimal ways to fix it. Get the full abstract, links to the first MSDN webcast (which you should review before Monday) and download the pdf so you have it ready for taking notes!

In an attempt to try to put together best practices that lead to a more performant and manageable system I'm going to start with some simple ones... Table creation and table design.

In having worked with databases - and gone to many large events - I've been asked some of the most interesting questions... One of my favorites (and this was years ago) was when someone came up to me after an Indexing Best Practices Session, and asked if I could answer an index question. I said yes...

Today was the official holiday day for the 4th of July... time to go sailing!

Wrapping up the week of Tech Ed in Amsterdam... Great people, great lectures, GREAT EVENT. Here's a bit of my favorite highlights, a few "thank yous" and a few pics. Really had a great week.