I realized that I’d fixed an issue with my sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks script to correctly parse out the parallelism nodeId from the resource_description column (as newer versions include
In Monday’s Insider newsletter I discussed an email question I’d been sent about how to identify the transactions that had rolled back because of a crash, and
As we all wind down for the 2016 holiday season, we want to give the SQL Server community a holiday gift to say ‘thank you’
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
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’
(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
Edit 10/30/19: the latest version of this script, with additions and adapted for newer versions is here. Over the holidays I was playing around with parallelism
As we all wind down for the 2014 holiday season, we want to give the SQL Server community a holiday gift to say ‘thank you’
In both my wait statistics pre-conference workshops at the PASS Summit and SQLintersection I promised to do a bunch of blog posts. The second one
[Edit 2016: Check out my new resource – a comprehensive library of all wait types and latch classes – see here.] (Script last updated June
[Edit 2016: Check out my new resource – a comprehensive library of all wait types and latch classes – see here.] Wait statistics, as you
As we all wind down for the 2013 holiday season, we want to give the SQL Server community a holiday gift to say ‘thank you’
Whenever I’m teaching about index fragmentation I get asked how to track page splits proactively. This can be useful to discover fragmentation occurring in indexes
I originally blogged a series of corruption demos and associated databases back in 2008, for use with SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Since then the
As we approach the 2012 holiday season, we want to give the SQL Server community a holiday gift to say ‘thank you’ for all your
In my previous post I explained how the sp_configure settings are stored in a special page in the master database called the CONFIG block. Sometimes
Back in January I posted the results of the cluster key size survey I ran in 2011 and explained how the larger the cluster key
Yesterday I blogged about how having too few or too many nonclustered indexes can be a big problem for performance (see here). Today I’m posting
This is a performance tuning post that's been on my to-do list for quite a while. Wait stats analysis is a great way of looking
(Check out my Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions.) Back in April I kicked off a survey where I asked
(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.) It’s all
(New for 2020: we’ve published a range of SQL Server interview candidate screening assessments with our partner Kandio, so you can avoid hiring an ‘expert’ who
The very worst piece of advice I ever saw on the Internet was in response to someone asking on a SQL newsgroup ‘how can I
[Edit 2017: this query is still entirely applicable on all current versions of SQL Server.] Here’s a little script I knocked up this afternoon to
One of the perennial problems facing both experienced and involuntary DBAs is how to tell whether a database is really in the Full recovery model
Yes, I'm a week late (at least) uploading these, and I apologize. But better late than never! For those lucky 48 people who attended our
This is a question that comes up every so often, most recently this morning while teaching a private class (and Kimberly's teaching now): how large
I came across a question on ServerFault this afternoon that inflamed my desire to be ultra-geeky (it was really already inflamed after teaching backup and
There’s still a widely held misconception that when properly in the FULL or BULK_LOGGED recovery models that full or differential backups can truncate the log.
About a year ago, I blogged a cool script that would work out how much of a database has changed since the last full backup
After teaching some of the MCM-SharePoint class last week, one of the attendees pointed me at a blog post about measuring churn in SharePoint databases.
While I was teaching the MCM-Database class last week, we were discussing fragmentation and the effect of a high-order GUID key on an index. Without
Way back at the start of me blogging here I wrote a comprehensive description of ghost records and the ghost cleanup process – see Inside
Ola Hallengren, who we meet every so often at SQL Connections, has a great script that helps automate consistency checking, backups, and index maintenance. He's
After writing the FILESTREAM whitepaper for Microsoft, I’ve had lots of questions about the structure of the FILESTREAM data container. The FILESTREAM data container is
In the TechNet Magazine article I wrote on Advanced Troubleshooting with Extended Events, I mentioned the always-on event session called system_health. Jonathan Kehayias, a fellow
Wow – today is all about new content. As if I haven't already blogged about enough stuff to keep you reading through next week, the
Over the last few weeks Sunil Agarwal (from the SQL Storage Engine team) has posted a great series of blog articles about tempdb and the version
This blog post describes the demo "2 – NC Indexes" from my Corruption Survival Techniques conference session from various conferences in 2008. The links to
For those of you who couldn't make it to a conference this year where I presented my Corruption Survival Techniques session, the folks at TechEd
This blog post describes the demo “1 – Fatal Errors” from my Corruption Survival Techniques conference session from various conferences in 2008. The links to
This blog post explains the demo scripts and databases I've posted to cover all the Corruption Survival Techniques and DBCC CHECKDB sessions I've presented at
It's been a long time since the last Conference Questions Pot-Pourri – in fact it was at the last SQL Connections in Orlando in April.
This is a quick post inspired by a question I was sent in email (thanks Marcos!) which very neatly lets me show a DMV I’ve
I woke up this morning and someone had replaced my wife with someone who likes to blog :-). Kimberly’s turned over a new leaf and is
As you may already know, instant file initialization is a way to prevent data (not log) file create and grow operations having to zero-initialize the
Today I presented my brand new session Surviving Corruption: From Detection to Recovery at TechEd. I had a lot of fun putting together the demos, presenting
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