Microsoft made SQL Server 2008 Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) Readiness Videos available on their site. Here they are Enjoy!

You probably well aware that keeping statistics up-to-date is essential for SQL Server performance. You may also well know that if statistics is missing on the columns of the table SQL Server creates _WA_Sys* stats for you automatically to have something...

Hello readers! Couple of days ago I had to move large table (~43 mln rows) from production environment to a dev environment. Below is a table structure as follows: CREATE TABLE [mmm].[Music Band]( [BandID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL...

I guess many of you are familiar with build in SQL server function @@version, which you can use to quickly tell what SKU of SQL Server and Windows OS you are using as well as build numbers. Perhaps you are also aware of serverproperty(param) function...

Hello, everyone! Today I am going to chat briefly about the question a co-worker asked me about. The problem was with embedding one XML snippet generated by using FOR XML option of the query into another XML also generated using FOR XML option. Here is...

While working with SQL Server you've probably heard certain restrictions like 'There can be at most 1,024 columns declared in the table' or 'There can be only 8,600 bytes per row'. Some are urban legends and travel by the word of mouth others are hard...

Some time ago I wrote a post how SQL Server optimizer keep track of what indexes maybe beneficial and logs this info into sys.dm_db_missing_index_* DMVs. Brent Ozar kindly pointed out that one can script 'CREATE INDEX' statement to build missing indexes...

With this post I will start writing some small TSQL coding patterns and tricks which make daily life of SQL Server database developer easier and are used a LOT when dealing with large databases. Data developers frequently have to update rows in tables...

Many organization have lots of Excel reports and pivot tables whose data comes from SQL Server. As data on the backend database changes you would need to repopulate your excel books with updated information. Doing it by hand can be very tedious manual...

As many of you may know, most of the time performance problems with SQL server come from bad queries/execution plans. That is why it is important to know how to interpret them. Most of you are likely peeked on graphical execution plans in SQL Server once...

Recently I was working on datawarehouse project during which i had to automate generation of indexes for fact tables. Tuning SQL Server relational warehouse is a complex task. As you may already know fact tables have lots of foreign keys into dimension...

Microsoft finally published SQL Server 2008 failover clustering whitepaper which can be found here

Hi guys! While travelling around Australia and helping Microsoft customers to get work done with SQL Server, I was quite surprized to realize how many customers do not know about Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Virtual Labs . There you can remotely test...

and can be downloaded here

Hello fellow readers! It has been a while since I posted. Sorry about that - have been busy travelling around customers in Australia. Let me write a few words how you can easily increase performance of your database application without doing much...

It can be downloaded here

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ...

Here is a cool perk from Red-Gate: a free EBook by Alan Hirt ‘Pro SQL Server 2005 High Availability’ http://downloads.red-gate.com/ebooks/DBA_ebook_pack.zip. Enjoy! -Yuriy

Hello again ! This is yet another post on SQL Server failover clustering. Hope you don't mind :). I was working the other day on the case and customer had a SQL Server 2005 cluster. As I was looking at output of sp_configure I noticed that it had 'priority...

I was recently asked by a customer who just installed SQL Server 2005 with SP2 on 3 node failover cluster if he can rename SQL Server resource group after SQL Server is installed. The answer is Yes it is possible and does not affect functionality of SQL...

Good day, everyone! With this post I will start a series of posts describing tools which everyone of you can use to troubleshoot SQL Server problems. They are freely available and either come standard with SQL Server distribution or freely downlodable...

Hello my fellow readers! I want to bring to your attention one small thing which will likely save you time and relieve from lots of headaches when installing SQL Server on the cluster. I am talking about special characters like & < > " etc in...

Micrsoft SQL Server 2005 SP3 is now available for download here . Fixes and changes made in SP3 are documented in KB article 955706 .

Hi guys! Hope you had great holidays! Since Christmas and New Year are past us, let me resume blogging on SQL Server. I am guessing I won't be making big news if I tell you that SQL Server database is just a collection of 8K pages. Each page serves different...

Some of you might have faced the situation when there is an error in the SQL Server error log or Windows Event logs but you do not know what to do about it. Examples of possible errors are below, Error 1101 “Could not allocate a new page for database...