Tim’s first ever Pluralsight course has been published – SQL Server: Consolidation Tactics and Best Practices – and is just over two hours long. It consolidates (ha!) all of Tim’s
Erin’s new course is called SQL Server: Replacing Profiler with Extended Events and is just under 2.5 hours long. It’s based on her very popular user group/conference session
There’s a persistent myth that you cannot upgrade a database to a version more that is more then two versions newer. It’s not true. You
It’s finally ready! For the last two years, I’ve been working on-and-off on a new community resource. It was postponed during 2015 while I mentored
Yesterday in class we had a discussion around the conceptual problem of reconciling the fact that SQL Server does set-based operations, but that it does
Edit 10/30/19: the latest version of this script, with additions and adapted for newer versions is here. A question came up in class today about easily seeing the
Over the weekend there was a discussion on the MVP distribution list about the sys.dm_tran_database_transactions DMV and how one cannot use it to accurately determine
Through the end of July, we’re offering a complete single-instance health-check for a flat fee of US$2,500… One of the most popular services we provide
Erin’s new course is called SQL Server: Understanding and Using DBCC Commands and is just over 2.25 hours long. It covers all the documented DBCC commands and a
No, this isn’t an April fools joke. Microsoft announced today at the Build conference that they’ve made SQL Server 2014 (and 2016 when it ships)
My first post of the year is about our first Pluralsight course of the year! Jonathan’s new course is called SQL Server: Building Simple Asynchronous Applications and is just
The last post of the year! It’s been a really excellent year all round and time for my traditional post counting down some of the
Back in 2009 I started posting a summary at the end of the year of what I read during the year (see my posts from 2009, 2010, 2011,
Through popular demand (our IEPTO2 class in Ireland in October 2015 sold out with 40 students!) we’ve managed to juggle a bit more of our schedule
As we all wind down for the 2015 holiday season, we want to give the SQL Server community a holiday gift to say ‘thank you’
I’m running this survey to help the SQL Server team at Microsoft, who would like to get a broad view of current tempdb configurations. I’ll
An interesting corruption problem cropped up on the MCM distribution list yesterday and after I figured it out, I thought it would make a good
After the success of our brand-new class on Practical Data Science this week, we’ve decided to expand it to five days and bring it back
By the end of December, we at SQLskills will have remotely presented to 87 user groups and PASS virtual chapters around the world in 2015! We’d
In my Insider newsletter a couple of weeks ago, I discussed how index fragmentation is often considered when designing indexes, but index depth often isn’t. In
[Edit 2016: Check out my new resource – a comprehensive library of all wait types and latch classes – see here.] SQL Server 2014 (and
This year’s Fall SQLintersection conference in October is fast approaching and we’ve got some excellent full-day workshops lined up for you: Sunday 25th: Kimberly with Queries
I’ve just released our London classes for 2016 for registration! We’ll be teaching the following classes: IEPTO1: Immersion Event on Performance Tuning and Optimization – Part
We’re very excited to announce that we’re partnering with our friends at Linchpin People to offer two new Immersion Events on SSIS, both debuting in 2016 along
I’ve just released our first sets of US classes for 2016 for registration! Our classes in April/May will be in Chicago, IL: IE0: Immersion Event
I just spent a couple of hours fruitlessly trying to solve a problem and thought I’d blog the solution in case anyone else hits the
The two major Fall conferences (PASS Summit and SQLintersection) are coming up in October so I wanted to give you a heads-up about what I’ll be presenting.
One of the corruptions that can stymie all efforts at disaster recovery is broken boot page. If the boot page can’t be processed, the database
On the second Tuesday of each month, many people in the SQL Server community join together to all blog on the same topic – a
We’ve released our Fall lineup of classes for registration! Our November classes in Chicago, IL will be: IE0: Immersion Event for Junior/Accidental DBAs November 16
My latest Pluralsight course has been published! It’s called SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions and is just over 2.5 hours long. The modules
In the last IEHADR class we just had in Chicago, I was doing a demo of looking in the transaction log to find the point
Kimberly’s latest Pluralsight course is live! This is part 2 of her very popular course: SQL Server: Optimizing Stored Procedure Performance. The course is more
Last weekend there was a suggestion on the MVP distribution list about having temporary nonclustered indexes on AG readable secondaries, in the same way that
It’s been a while since I’ve done a survey, and this one is inspired by a discussion I had with Matt Slocum (b | t) yesterday that led
Last year PASS introduced some eligibility requirements for voting in the 2014 PASS elections, but a lot of people didn’t get the message for various
(Check out my Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Performance Troubleshooting Using Wait Statistics and my comprehensive library of all wait types and latch classes.) One of
We’re very excited to announce that we’re offering a new Immersion Event on Practical Data Science using Azure Machine Learning, SQL Data Mining, and R,
Here’s an interesting question that came up in our IEPTO1 class in Chicago this week (paraphrasing): I was doing a demo recently where I was demonstrating
We’re just about to leave for three weeks of Immersion Events in Chicago, starting next week, and if that wasn’t enough, we’ve got our Spring 2015
Last week, for the second time in as many weeks, I was sent a question in email from someone who had a transaction log that
PASS has just released the top-10 rated sessions from the 2014 PASS Summit for everyone to watch for free! My Advanced Data Recovery Techniques session
Back in 2009 I blogged about how checkpoints work (see How do checkpoints work and what gets logged) and I received a question in email
The story I wrote for our SQLskills Insider newsletter on Monday last week resonated so well with people that I thought I’d publish it here
A couple of weeks ago I kicked off a competition of sorts, to find some people to mentor to celebrate the community voting me “Person You’d
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday (hosted by Kenneth Fisher – @sqlstudent144) is about security This hasn’t been my area of expertise for a long time, although I did write a long
Every year Redgate hands out a series of Tribal Awards, voted for by the SQL Server community around the world. In the 2013 awards I won
Since SQL server 2014 was released back in April last year, there have been some rumblings about changes to how many VLFs are created when
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