In this survey I’d like to see what the distribution of the number of data files and filegroups per database is for your servers. Please run the following code (with example output): And send me the results for as many servers as you want. You can either email me plaintext or a spreadsheet or append [...]

In this survey I’d like to know what the oldest version of SQL Server is in your environment – it has to be an instance that’s being used for a production workload in some way (even just occasionally). I’ll report on the results next week. Thanks!

For those of you who were planning to register for our IE1 Immersion Event (on Internals and Designing for Performance) in Chicago at the end of April, I have bad news and good news… The bad news is that the class reached maximum capacity (30 students) and is sold out. The good news is that [...]

The last post of the year! It's been an excellent year all round – I thought that instead of doing a long post about goals etc, I'd again count down the numbers that have been my life this year. 7374413 (roughly): the number of page views on my blog as tracked by Google, from 141 [...]

Yes, it's that time again. We're just about to have the Fall show so its time to start planning for the Spring 2012 show. Once again Kimberly and I will be Co-Chairs of the Conference and we'd like to invite you to submit abstracts for the Spring 2012 SQL Connections conference, to be held in Las Vegas, [...]

Every so often I get asked how to deal with SPID -2 and once in a blue moon I get asked about SPID -3. Neither of these SPIDs will show up in sysprocesses or sys.dm_exec_requests/sessions, but they're both valid SPIDs. SPID -2 is an orphaned DTC transaction. SPID -3 is a deferred transaction. Both SPIDs [...]

Wow! We had 35 entries in 5 days for our competition to win a free seat at our Master Immersion Event on Internals and Performance in Dallas in February. That was a lot of reading to get through to pick the winner, but we made it. Five people even started SQL Server blogs so they [...]

I finally had some time over the last two days to play with the Arduino board I picked up late last year. The Arduino is a pretty neat concept – wrapping a microcontroller up in a neat board that makes playing with sensors, displays, motors, etc and prototyping very simple. It's all open source and [...]

        Over the last six months on the blog, you’ll have seen me mention internal training that Kimberly and I wrote for Microsoft on SQL Server 2008. This deep training covers all the features around database infrastructure and scalability and we’ve just finished revamping it for RTM. We did a one-day version [...]

In the last few classes I've taught, we've discussed the on-disk structures where everything is stored in a database, and I've also been asked privately where all the info is on my blog. I know that a lot of people reading my blog now are new in the last six months or so and will [...]