Tim Chapman

We all probably realize that fragmentation can be a performance hindrance, especially for scanning operations. But, what does fragmentation really mean? What does it look like? I've been doing a lot of training for customers lately in terms of fragmentation...

Recently a friend and fellow PFE Dave Levy ( Twitter / Blog ) and I were discussing a question someone posted in a forum. The question was in regards to database mirroring latency when a reorganization occurs. Dave mentioned that he has seen in the past...

Today's tip isn't necessarily low-level, but it is a setting that you should consider turning on for your SQL Server instances (especially if you've got vendor applications that generate TSQL statements on the fly). The setting, "optimize for ad-hoc workloads...

A filtered index, introduced in SQL Server 2008, is a non-clustered index that contains only a subset of the number of rows contained in a table. Because there is a 1:1 ratio between the number of rows in a table and the number of rows in a regular non...

In a previous post I briefly went over how useful filtered indexes can be. Filtered indexes are a great feature that have numerous uses. However, like almost everything in computing, there are trade-offs, and filtered indexes are no exception. The challenge...

SQL Server has many ways to dig deep into diagnosing memory related problems. Today it is common to use Dynamic Management Objects (views/functions) to expose a large portion of this information. However, some useful data isn't consumable by DMVs, so...