This isn't perf-related like most of my earlier posts, but I thought it was useful enough that I should share it. We recently had a situation where we had to convert a hexadecimal string representation of a binary value to a true binary (e.g. varchar...

Did you know that your SQL Server is keeping track of the indexes that it thinks you should create? The "missing index" DMVs in SQL are a really great new feature in SQL Server 2005 that (in my opinion) seem to have been underutilized so far. If you want...