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...

Herve has done some work experimenting with max degree of parallelism (DOP) on some large multi processor blocks and based on that, has some recommendations for you if you're using more than 8 processors. Good reading!   Read more...

Is Windows 2003 really faster for a SQL Server/IIS environment? Let us do all the leg work for you! We are about to upgrade the SQLServerCentral.com web and SQL Server from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003. As part of the case study, we are going to capture a baseline of the server's overall performance before the upgrade and then again after the upgrade. We will then document the experience and benchmark numbers.   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...

Recompilation yields superior performance in some situations, although excessive recompilation can be detrimental. This article will discuss some of these costs and benefits, and will draw on contrasts between different versions of SQL Server to provide further context for understanding recompilation.   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...

This article is a case study of a performance problem at SQLServerCentral.com with our FAQ area using text columns. This will show you how to use the TEXT IN ROW feature built into SQL Server 2000 to improve the performance of these columns.   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...

There has been some talk about the use of partitioned views in SQL Server 2000 to gain performance improvements for scale-out of applications. In this article by Neil Jacobson, he discusses his findings in respect of the speed of partitioned views.   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...

You cannot do a proper tuning job on SQL server in two minutes, but you can get a good idea of how well a server is set up. This article will show you how to quickly evaluate the efficiency of memory usage on your server.   Read more...