Happy New Year! Do you make New Year's resolutions? I don't do that. Instead, my family and I always go out first thing New Year's Day (we don't party much on New Year's Eve - I know, I'm kinda weird like that) and find a food joint that is open. We...

I'm continuing my series on the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio , and today we’re in the database reports. You can find these reports by starting SQL Server Management Studio and right-clicking a database name. From the menu that appears...

I'm continuing my series on the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio , and today we’re in the database reports. You can find these reports by starting SQL Server Management Studio and right-clicking a database name. From the menu that appears...

I wrote a two-part article over on SQLServerCentral.com that you may want to check out on "How to become a DBA". Even if you already are a DBA, it's a great resource to point aspiring applicants to: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administration...

In this continuing series on the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio , we’re now up to the database-level reports. Today I’ll explain another report dealing with space in the database: Disk Usage by Partition: [DatabaseName] . To get to...

OK - it's a little light in some of the hallways because of Christmas, so I had a few minutes to actually chat with some friends. We played one of those mental games where you ask "if you could only have one thing for X, what would it be". I was asked...

We normally don't recommend one product or vendor over another, but sometimes there is an industry-recognized expert that has something particularly valuable. Kalen Delaney has a course you might be interested in - definitely check it out. It's a course...

I'm continuing my series on the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio . I’m covering two reports at once, since they have the same columns and output, but show the data from a different perspective. These two reports will help you find out...

I was working on a Functional Specification today, and I opened a tool to create two UML diagrams. We use UML as a standard, so I normally create fairly detailed use case and sequence diagrams for the developers. I find it's a great tool for us to be...

We’re in the first of the database-level reports in this series of the Standard Reports that ship with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) . To get to these reports, navigate from the server object in Object Explorer, move down to the Databases object...

OK, it's a shameless giveaway! See if you can fill out this puzzle, made with words you'll find in SQL Server Management Studio. Mail me the answers and I'll send out a small gift to one lucky reader with the right answers, chosen at random at the end...

We’re in the final server-level reports in this series of the Standard Reports that ship with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) . Don’t worry, there are plenty more reports coming in the database and other objects; but this one is the last of the reports...

I was thinking about something this morning on the ride into work that I’d like to ask your opinion about. It has to do with the amount of data that could be absorbed and acted on by a unit or system in a given period of time. The idea is that there...

I'm continuing my series on the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio . Today I'm covering a report on a feature you might not have used yet – the Service Broker. This feature, which you can read more about here , allows you to set up a messaging...

Steve Jones, my friend over at SQLServerCentral.com had a podcast the other day (Voice of the DBA) where he commented that blogs should be blogs - not a form of corporate communication. I agree. It's not that you can't have corporate content on an RSS...