Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit!   Read more...

Seagate has a white paper out that discusses how faster (15k rpm) drives can lead to lower cost of ownership. Interesting, and worth looking into.   Read more...

New author! Mike Pearson discusses how auto close was at the root of a performance problem he was troubleshooting, how you can check your servers easily, and discusses why both auto close and auto shrink are bad ideas in a production environment.   Read more...

A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   Read more...

Joseph recently had to upgrade a server from 4g to 8g of memory. Read how he did it and learn about some interesting aspects of AWE. For example, if you have 6.5g configured for use by SQL, how will task manager show used by sqlserver.exe?   Read more...

Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit!   Read more...

Middle tier applications often use a single database management system (DBMS) to store data, which can expose scaling limitations as the number of user requests increases. Caching, a technique used to increase application performance by copying data and then using the copied data in place of the original data, can dramatically increase the throughput (the number of application requests serviceable per unit time) and scalability of middle tier applications.   Read more...

This white paper outlines the following: -The steps to configure Log Shipping between two or more servers that are running SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. -The steps to configure Log Shipping between Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2), or later, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. -A brief comparison between Log Shipping and the other high availability-solutions that SQL Server provides.   Read more...

This white paper is a joint effort by Microsoft and Dell to demonstrate the scalability of SQL Server 2000 and Dell hardware.   Read more...

In an online transaction processing (OLTP) environment, the connection affinity mask option may provide performance enhancement in high-end, enterprise-level SQL Server environments that are running on computers with 16 or more CPUs. In particular, this option is useful when there are a significant number of network interactions (more than 10,000 per second) between the middle-tier application servers and the back-end SQL Server system.   Read more...