An interesting tale of David Bird's fight with tempdb.  Read more...

Monitoring in the real world. Roy Carlson concludes his series on space monitoring for your SQL Servers with a real world example of how he found a problem and fixed it.   Read more...

Trending the size data for your databases can be crucial when ordering new hardware or just ensuring that you can handle the load. In Part 3, Roy Carlson looks at how you get the sizes needed for your instances into Excel and generate a chart for trending of this important piece of performance data.   Read more...

Continuing with his series on monitoring space, Roy Carlson looks at checking the space in a folder to be sure your SQL Server databases never run out of storage.   Read more...

Joe has a bunch of small, easy to use scripts that can definitely be the beginning of a great set of monitoring tool. Amazing how much info you can gather with a little bit of code!   Read more...

One of the biggest performance gains built into SQL Server is the stored procedure. In this article by Brian Kelley, he shows you how to fully utilize, debug and monitor the caching of such objects.   Read more...

Knowing which databases are being backed up is a critical thing for all DBAs to know. After reading an article on this subject, new author Santveer Singh decided to share his own techniques for checking SQL Server databases and their backup status. He shows us how to look for failed backups as well as find those databases which have not been backed up.   Read more...

New Author! We've run a couple articles on similar topics, this one takes a slightly different approach. It's a short article and has two scripts included.   Read more...

Are you using alerts to help you keep track of things? Are you using as many alerts as you should be? Jeremy has a great list of alerts that he considers so important they are on his 'best practice' list. Definitely worth reading.   Read more...

The second part of Steve Jones's series on having SQL Server automatically report information to a DBA.   Read more...

Ever wanted to use the SQL Trace system stored procedures instead of Profiler, but got intimidated by the cryptic system stored procedure calls? Then this article is just for you. It will show you how to use SQL Trace system stored procedures and provide you with wrapper stored procedures, that can be used to quickly get server side traces up and running.   Read more...

Don't like the blackbox approach of maintenance plans? Like the maintenance plans but need a tweak to suit your needs? New author Robin Back has put together a monster script to allow you to build your own quickly and easily.   Read more...

Joe has a bunch of small, easy to use scripts that can definitely be the beginning of a great set of monitoring tool. Amazing how much info you can gather with a little bit of code!   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...

Have you ever had the problem where a user ran a query against your SQL Serer and crashed it or made the server unusable since the CPU was spiked at 100%? A SQL Server black box is the equivalent of a flight data record. The black box records all queries being passed to your SQL Server and other useful information like errors.   Read more...

We've had a good run of jobs about job management lately, Randy sent us another one that looks at the job of job management and shows us how he tackled the problem.   Read more...

Jobs are pretty basic aren't they? They are until you get a couple hundred, or a thousand. Andy continues talking about managing jobs by standardizing how you handle notifications and failures, and talks about an interesting idea to monitor jobs separately from SQL Agent. Worth reading!   Read more...

How many jobs do you have? 10? 100? 1000? Andy makes the point that what works to manage for a small number of jobs doesn't work when that number doubles or triples (well, unless you only had 1 job to start with!). In part one of two, this article looks at ideas for using categories and naming conventions to get things under control.   Read more...

Andy says Windows Authentication "is bad". What? That's not what Microsoft says! Heck, that's not even what we say! Everyone knows NT authentication is the way to go. Then again, when was the last time Andy wrote an article that wasn't worth reading?! Read the article, rate it and add a comment - and automatically be entered in a drawing for a copy of SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning donated by Microsoft Press.   Read more...