Due to a few different reasons, I'll be moving my blog from here at MSDN to the following location. Please update your rollers and links, I'm hoping to see everyone at the new locations below! http://www.mssqltips.com/author.asp?authorid=2 I've...

So, I think most of my close friends have heard by now, but if you are a friend, and you haven't heard, and this is how you're hearing about it, sorry about that - give me a call and I'll make it up to you over dinner and drinks or something :-). I...

I get many requests from customers for something like sp_who/sp_who2 for Sql 2005 with new columns/features/etc. specific to Sql 2005 (sp_who/sp_who2 are both included in Sql 2005, but they return exactly the same information as they did in Sql 2000)...

With Sql 2008 (in the current CTP you have in your hand), thanks to a new extension to the group by clause referred to as 'grouping sets', you now have the ability to use sets of grouping columns in your group by clauses, allowing you to define basically...

This post will cover an initial overview of the data compression feature that will be included in Sql Server 2008, and I'll also cover briefly some information on the Backup Compression feature as well (note that these are 2 totally separate and distinct...

So, I've been getting quite a few pings about providing a list of new features to look for in Katmai (Sql 2008) and/or those that I'll be either blogging about and/or presenting on at the DC area groups I mentioned here: http://blogs.msdn.com/chadboyd...

In Sql 2008 (Katmai), a couple of the 'smaller' features that are currently in the latest CTP include inline variable initialization and compound assignment (something you App Dev folks have had for years). So, the following types of code now work in...

In August, September, and October I'll be presenting on Sql Server 2008 (Katmai) at a variety of groups in the DC/Baltimore area. We'll be demoing lots of the new functionality with Sql 2008, including but not limited to Change Data Capture, MERGE, Table...

So you think you know SQL...Administration Part I The 2nd in the series...this one revolves around Administration and Internals of Sql Server, and is the 1st of 2-4 groups of questions in just Administration and Internals...again, these are seperated...

The first in hopefully a fairly long series of posts on interview type questions/scenarios/etc., this one will cover Concurrency and Locking related Q/A (simple Q/A only at this point). The questions are separated into easy, moderate, and difficult groups...

I'm frequently asked about questions that are asked when interviewing candidates for Sql Server related positions, what topics should be covered, what types of questions should be asked, etc. In spirit of trying to address this as well as a range of basic...

If you're in the DC/Nova/Baltimore area and are interested in a presentation covering Service Broker scenarios with Sql Server 2005, I'll be presenting at the Capital Area Microsot Integration and Connected Systems user group (MICSUG) at the Microsoft...

So, here's an interesting scenario I ran into a few weeks back. A customer had a situation in which they were using a read-only database (to serve reports/ad-hoc queries during production hours) that was loaded nightly with differential data from a variety...

After a nice vacation (to Italy for a friend's wedding...very nice country...) I'm back and hopefully will be posting a couple of technical topics in the next few days to get caught-up on my absense. In the meantime, if any of you are in the DC area...

I ran into an interesting scenario with a customer this past week that behaved a bit differently than I expected (not having ever verified the behavior before, or even considering it I guess) at first. After spending some time thinking about it, I think...

I spent this past week with a customer giving a workshop covering Sql 2000 architecture and performance related information (interpreting query plans, index structures, etc., etc.), and during the course of the week a few good points came to light that...

Similar to my post here ( http://blogs.msdn.com/chadboyd/archive/2007/03/11/what-indexes-are-used-most-often-or-least-often-on-my-server.aspx ) regarding index usage, you can use the following code below to get index operational information (exposed via...

Well, I'm now also presenting at the CMAP Code Camp the week following the NOVA CodeCamp, so, if you're in the Baltimore/DC area (or even NOVA and can't make the NOVA CodeCamp the week before), I'll be presenting at least the same 2 sessions at the CMAP...

If you're in the DC/NOVA area (or even some parts of Maryland for that matter), I'll be presenting 2 sessions at the NOVA CodeCamp on April 14th at the Microsoft offices in Reston, VA. My presentations will cover new development features in Sql Server...

Many customers (and non-customers) are often confused about all the different memory configurations and options available on 32bit systems (64bit systems do not have so many considerations thanks to the large flat memory space and a VAS size of 16 terabytes...

A customer this past week was curious how to determine which indexes on their server were being used either very frequently or very infrequently. This type of information can be invaluable when tuning a server on both ends: finding the most frequently...

Earlier this week I had a customer send me the following question: I have a server running the 32-bit edition of SQL 2005 SP1 with 16 GB of memory and 8 CPUs. AWE is enabled and the max server memory setting is 12 GB. When the service is started, memory...

A customer recently questioned me regarding a sorting issue they were having in the following scenario: My database is running under the "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" Sql collation, but when I run the script below I seem to get incorrect sort results...

A customer this week inquired about auto updating of statistics in Sql 2005, particularly with regards to how and what the new AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC option is and how it works...well, here you have it... With Sql Server 2005, the AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC...

The same customer that promted the post of mine titled "How can I get sysindexes information in Sql 2005?" posed a follow-up question - what is the hobt_id column in the sys.partitions catalog view and how does it relate to other catalog views/structures...