It’s time for a new laptop. I don’t think it’s time, as I love the Macbook Air I bought a...  Read more...

Typically, I am a big advocate of performance monitor but one place I commonly see performance monitor being misused is with benchmarking...  Read more...

Hello Dear Reader!  I’ve been doing a lot of work with Windows Server 2012 lately.  The interface is wildly different...  Read more...

Not exactly groundbreaking information, but were you aware that you can run SQLIO with multiple files?  Until a couple months...  Read more...

With the release of the 22nm Ivy Bridge microarchitecture less than three weeks away, at the end of April 2012,...  Read more...

A Thousand Men Marching Still Only March As Fast As One Man. la·ten·cy - Computers . the time required to locate the first bit or character in a storage location, expressed as access timeminus word time. Often when talking to people...  Read more...

On February 18, Franck Delattre released version 1.57 of the very useful CPU-Z Utility. Here is a list of the...  Read more...

There was a conversation on Twitter recently (with the #sqlhelp hashtag) about whether it was completely safe to run the...  Read more...

Here is another example CPU throttling from someone who had a server running with the default “Balanced” Power Plan in...  Read more...

Here is a small selection of useful tools for getting some specific hardware information from any Windows based system you...  Read more...

Glenn Barry (blog, twitter) posted a note about MySpace using Fusion-IO PCi-E cards to replace hard drives in their systems....  Read more...

I arrived in Richmond, VA this morning earlier than expected. I was meeting a few people and things were pushed back, so I had the chance to go by Best Buy and find a USB->VGA adapter. Apparently they don’t have the HP VGA cable, so I got this adapter...  Read more...

We got something good in the mail last week! Some quick observations: The build quality is outstanding. Nothing cheap at all about this card. The engineering that has gone into this shows in every way. It is made up of modules that...   Read more...

I do more than just SQL Server. I enjoy programming. In my former life I have worked with C/C++ and Assembler. I also spent quite a bit of time in Visual Basic. I loved it for prototyping and what we now call RAD development efforts.  Read more...

I’ve often described SQL Server to people new to databases as a data pump. Just like a water pump, you have limited capacity to move water in or out of a system usually measured in gallons per hour. If you want to upgrade your pumping systems it can be...  Read more...

The other day I was wandering around Best Buy and noticed that they had a few netbooks for sale. I stopped by because I've considered using one for presentations and some light travel, instead of lugging around my full sized notebook. Vacations, maybe...  Read more...